


First

by Redbone135



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 37,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24790873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redbone135/pseuds/Redbone135
Summary: Non-Magic Au. Baelfire Gold and Emma Nolan grew up across the street from each other, but despite the very small geographic distance, their lives could not be any more worlds apart. Still, they become close as they grow up over the years, there for each other through all those big "first moments". Starts with baby swanfire and follows them through their college years.
Relationships: Baelfire | Neal Cassidy/Emma Swan
Comments: 145
Kudos: 21





	1. Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

> I'm actually going to write this one, guys, I promise. Sorry about the false start last time.

Bae was there the first time they brought Emma Nolan home. He was seven months old and he doesn’t remember a single second of it, but everyone tells him he was there and so he has to believe them. 

The Nolans and the Golds had never really seen eye to eye, despite living across the street from each other for as long as either family can remember, and so Milah Gold had not intended to intrude upon such a monumentous moment in her neighbors’ life. Or so she said. 

David helped his wife out of the car, the two of them all smiles and that jittery new-parent energy - before the absolute dread and demanding doubt sets in - excited to share their home with its newest member. 

Milah, who felt a little sour at how happy they both looked, sat on her front porch, bouncing her son on her knee as she watched the happy couple fuss over the car-seat in the back. Milah had already reached that stage of parenthood where she had begun to dread her son’s constant wailing and grabby little fingers. She had already reached that stage of motherhood where the doubt settles in and she starts counting down the years until eighteen and wonders if she can really make it that long without going insane. 

“Good Luck,” she shouts to Mary Margaret as they pull their little girl from the car, David shouldering her hospital bag as if it weighs nothing. 

The couple is too happy to read too much into her ominous warning, and so they turn and wave cheerfully. Milah doesn’t return the wave, but Bae does. He takes his little fingers out of his mouth long enough to shake his fist enthusiastically at them, the Nolans smiling at his childish attempt at a greeting.

“Maybe they’ll be friends one day,” Mary Margaret shouts, tilting her little girl a little higher in her arms so that Milah can get a good look at the little pink bundle swaddled in home-stitched blankets and unrelenting, unconditional love.

_ Not if I have anything to say about it _ , Milah thinks, but she doesn’t say it, she just smiles and nods and bounces her son a little faster. 

Fortunately David Nolan feels the same way. Kind of. 

“You better keep an eye on him,” he jokes as he slams the car door and leads his wife up the path to their own front porch, “My little princess isn’t going to be spending too much time with boys, well into her late thirties.”

His wife gives him a joking punch to the shoulder, jostling the baby in her arms just enough that it wakes, letting out a loud wail.

Milah winces as the noise, but little Bae only giggles.

She supposes he recognizes another crying infant, enjoys the comradery of someone besides his mother for once.

A week later, when Rumple Gold returns from his most recent deployment, she is eager to shove their son into his arms as she sets about making another dinner she doesn’t much feel like eating. She had married a soldier for the adventure. The foreign cultures and exciting travel - dreaming of being stationed far away from the sleepy town she and her husband had grown up in. Bae had kind of put a damper on that, now hadn’t he?

“The Nolans had their baby,” she tells her husband as he sets the table, Bae in one hand, a bunch of silverware in the other. “It’s a little girl.”

Rumple looks a tad disappointed; she knows he had been hoping their baby would be a boy. Someone to run up and down the street with Bae, riding bicycles and chasing sunsets the way he and his friends had when they were younger. 

“Have we invited them over yet to meet her?” he asks instead, and Milah can see the gears shifting behind his eyes. No longer a best friend for his son, but something more. Still sunsets and bicycles, but of a different kind. 

“ _ We _ haven’t done anything.  _ You’ve _ been away.  _ I _ can if you’d like.”

“We probably should. They’re probably dying for a little break.”

Milah doubts it. She sees the Nolans out walking their baby up and down the block every morning, smiles on their faces as they babble to whatever neighbors will listen about their pride and joy. Emma. It’s such a boring name. Milah hadn’t wanted boring for her son. But to each their own, and the Nolans had always been a bit on the boring side.

“I’ll invite them tomorrow,” she promises as she sets their plates down in front of them and watches as Bae grabs for the baked carrots on his father's plate.

“Careful, Bae, you’ll burn your fingers,” Rumple laughs as he pushes his son’s hand away. 

“He’ll never learn if you don’t let him,” Milah scolds as she sits down across from her boys. Boys she never planned on having, to be honest. She had married Rumple as her ticket out of this town, had been so close to achieving that goal, when she had found out about Bae. Her son had not only taken that ticket, but torn it up and turned it into a kind of restraint meant to hold her here now. “He’s got enough teeth he should be starting to eat solids soon anyway.”

Rumple beams proudly at his son, as if growing teeth was something only his little boy could do, and begins to settle Bae into his highchair next to the table.

“It might be nice for the Nolans to come over,” he continues to prod, “You could use someone to have playdates with while I’m away.”

_ Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got playdates, _ Milah thought bitterly to herself, but she smiled and nodded and pretended to be happy with that plan.

When the Nolans brought Emma over the following week, it was with a whole parade of toys and bags and general baby supplies Milah had never felt the need to bother with. But their enthusiasm made it hard not to compare the two children.

Emma was fragile and pink, wrapped in a blanket Mary Margaret had no doubt crocheted herself, a little white dress with lace around the collar and sleeves, completely free of stains. She had big round eyes that took in the world around her curiously, a light dusting of David’s blond hair atop her head. She gurgled and cooed and looked as cute as a button, the perfect addition to the Nolan household.

Bae sat in his playpen and whined, like his mother, he always hated to be confined. Milah hadn’t really been planning to show him off, he was already almost a year and the Nolans had had plenty of time to adjust to his presence, but Rumple had shoved him into a little yellow onesie at the last minute. Bae had already plucked at the top two snaps, determined to break free of it as quickly as possible. Now he opened and closed his tiny little hands, letting out a high pitched squeal with a furrowed brow as he reached for the bag of toys David was carrying.

“Bae, those aren’t yours,” Rumple laughed, ruffling the chocolate curls that always seemed to tangle. 

“It’s okay,” Mary Margaret laughed, leaning down to hand him a stuffed bear, “Emma can share.”

But he picked up the bear and tossed it with all his might against the edge of the playpen.

David and Milah’s eyes widened at the sudden display of toddler anger, but Mary Margaret only chuckled as she offered him another toy in its place.

That one ended up thrown so hard it bounced out of the little pen and skidded across the floor, all four adults stunned into complete silence. 

“He’s just being cranky,” Milah sighed. “He gets that way sometimes.”

“I think,” Rumple mumbled, picking Bae up out of his pen and adjusting the boy in his arms as he brought him closer to the Nolans, “He wants to see the baby.”

And sure enough, that’s what Bae had wanted, his whining ceasing as he got within arm’s reach of little Emma. His eyes grew wide at the sight of another baby, just like him but smaller - and a little better cared for if we were being honest - hands reaching out gingerly to grip at the edge of the blanket she was wrapped in.

Both Milah and David surged forward, ready to pull his little fingernails away from Emma, but Rumple and Mary Margaret giggled as Bae, more careful than he had ever been, reached out and clumsily booped Emma on the nose. 

“Is that your friend?” Mary Margaret laughed at him, his stormy grey eyes looking up at her with curiosity and then quickly back to the baby in her arms. “Be gentle, Bae, she’s a lot smaller than you.”

And he was, mostly, content just to stare at the other tiny human. 

Bae didn’t remember the day they brought Emma Nolan home, but he knew that for as long as he _ could  _ remember, he had never felt less alone than when Emma was there beside him. 


	2. Steps

Emma was there the day Baelfire Gold took his first steps. 

She swears she remembers it, but everyone else just laughs at her. She wasn’t even a year old yet, how could she possibly remember that? But she does, she swears it.

She was on the front porch, bouncing in the baby swing to the music pumping out of it’s speakers, while Mary Margaret was out refilling the bird feeders in their yard. It was a warm summer day, and the bright sunlight brought a smile to her little baby face, smeared in sunscreen and covered in a hat, though that wasn’t the part she remembered. 

There is a lot to the story she doesn’t remember. The boy across the street, the one her mother often babysat so that Emma could have some company her own age, was climbing up and down the steps of his own front porch while his mother stood at the front gate, flirting with the mailman. He had started off cautiously, grabbing onto each one with care, making sure his knees were sitting flat before reaching for the next one. Turning around and sliding his bottom from one to the next on his way back down. But the longer Milah flirted, the less cautious the boy became, tearing up and down the stairs like a protagonist in a horror movie trying to escape a dimly lit basement.

Mary Margaret looked up, offering a half-hearted wave to Milah, and then went right back to pouring seed into the feeder, eager to avert her gaze.

It wasn’t like she and David didn’t know what Milah Gold got up to while her husband was away. The woman didn’t make much of an effort to hide it. But it was none of their business, at least that’s what David said, and as much as Mary Margaret didn’t like the idea of keeping secrets, it’s not like Mr. Gold was around often enough for her to spill the beans. Still, she offered to watch little Bae whenever she could - worried that he was unattended while his mother was… very much not unattended.

She had asked David once if he thought they should call the cops, but he had shaken his head and put down his paper and explained to her that adultery wasn’t a crime, as much as he wished it was. 

“What would you do if it was one of your students?” he had asked her, placing a kiss on Emma’s forehead as they tucked her into her crib - no blankets, no toys, no dangers. 

“I guess I would wait,” she mumbles, but she still inspects Bae for bruises every chance she gets. Still keeps an eye out for anything that could be considered neglect. But Milah skirted that line so carefully, Mary Margaret almost suspected she had experience with this sort of thing. That maybe Milah Gold had learned how to be a mother from her own mother.

But it wasn’t their business. 

The little boy across the street wails as he plops down the steps, drawing his mother’s attention away from the mailman for a moment so that she can pick him up and put him right back on the porch. She whispers something to him and he quickly hushes, a sulky toddler picking at the peeling paint while Milah goes right back to her gentleman caller. Mary Margaret wishes she might care a little bit more about the paint chips her son is putting in his mouth, but it’s not her place and she knows Milah would only get ugly with her if she tried to say something.

So she shakes her head, returning to the porch to check on her own child, happily humming to the classical music the Nolans play for her. David read somewhere that it is supposed to stimulate brain development, but Mary Margaret had heard that was colors, and so they also made sure Emma had a wide variety of colorful and exciting toys. She wasn’t very interested in them, though. She didn’t really pay attention to the bedtime stories David read to her, and no amount of brightly-colored bath toys would keep her from angrily splashing Mary Margaret in enough water to drown an army. 

What Emma liked was other people.

She liked to be talked to. Loved it when they sang to her.

From an early age, Emma demanded attention; wanting to be as much a part of any conversation as the adults holding her. And she loved other children her age. Loved the Mommy and Me group Mary Margaret had joined so that Emma could play with the other babies her own age. Much to David’s annoyance, she also loved when Baelfire came to visit. He was a little older, and a lot less gentle than the kids in her Mommy and Me class, but Mary Margaret couldn’t blame him when he wasn’t being taught how to behave at home. And Emma never did seem to mind when he would yank a toy out of her hand to put it in his own mouth, hadn’t even cried last week when he’d pulled himself up onto the couch to get out of having to share her toys. In fact, some might say she seemed to like the challenge of retrieving her stolen toys from the rough-and-tumble neighbor even more than when she was sharing with the other babies in class.

“She’s just like her mother,” David would laugh as he snatched the toy out of Bae’s hands and returned it to Emma, who, if Mary Margaret didn’t know better, looked almost smug about her father coming to her rescue.

There was another wail as Bae tumbled down the front steps, annoyed at his own slow, crawling progress across the front walk, and Mary Margaret had half a mind to run over there and pick him up. But Milah, to her credit, turned and lifted him up, bouncing him on her hip and making a show of kissing his palms to calm him, all the while continuing her conversation with the mailman. 

But he seemed to like that even less than his tumble down the stairs, thrashing and screaming - and boy, could that baby scream - as Milah did everything she could to hold on to him.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized, “I don’t know what has gotten into him.”

The mailman nodded, turning away to continue down the sidewalk, and Milah made her way up the front porch steps, scolding her son, who was struggling so hard Mary Margaret was almost worried she was about to see a toddler splattered on the pavement.

But just then Emma cooed from her spot on the porch and so Mary Margaret turned her attention away from the scene across the street to pick up her own child and comfort her with a gentle bounce, settling back into the white rocking chairs David had painted her for her first Mother’s Day. 

“He’s got a set of lungs on him,” she laughed to Emma, who seemed really interested in the crying coming from across the street. “Thank goodness you don’t cry like that.”

Then again, Emma never had a reason to cry like that. Emma was cared for, wanted, loved, protected. Emma had two parents who gave her their undivided attention and a mother who didn’t flirt with the mailman. 

Mary Margaret shook her head as Milah sat the baby down on the porch, in an attempt to stop his flailing, and the little boy was off again, tumbling down the stairs and onto the front path.

“Baelfire Neal Cassidy Gold!” She heard Milah yell across the street as Mary Margaret clutched her own baby tighter to her chest. “You get back here this instant!”

But Bae had already begun his long tradition of not listening, and so both mothers watched in shock and awe as he pushed himself up onto his feet and toddled across the little path as if his life depended on it.

And that was the part Emma swore she remembered. 

Bae, balancing on his own two feet as if the sidewalk was a tightrope over crocodile infested waters, running, really kind of tripping forward, towards the little white fence at the edge of his yard.

She swears she remembers him crashing into the gate, full force, as if he hadn’t been expecting it to be there, his little toddler fingers gripping at the wood as he tried his best to peek through the gaps in the posts to smile up at her and her mother. 

People tell her she is just remembering the thousands of other times she saw that mischievous, trouble-starting grin, pressed against the gate as he looked at her across the street in the little life he would never have but always wanted. She had no shortage of that smile in her childhood, people would remind her when she swore up and down that she remembered those first frantic steps away from his mother and towards her. 

But she remembered that one, she was sure of it, as he laughed and reached for her, his mother scooping him back up into her arms and carrying him into the house.

Yes, Emma swore she remembered Bae’s first steps. The first of many he would take trying to get closer to her. 


	3. Words

Bae’s first real memory is of Emma’s first words. 

He’s been talking everyone's ears off for a couple months now, and he’s pretty sure everyone, from his own parents to the neighbors, kind of wished he hadn’t learned to talk. 

He had started simple, his first word an energetic “No!” when Milah had tried to tell him it was bedtime one night, and instead of the excitement that normally accompanies a child’s first word, Milah had just looked a little exhausted. 

For weeks “no” was all he said to anyone who would listen. 

“Do you want veggies?” “No!”

“Can you please stop throwing a fit and get in the bath?” “No!”

“Is your name Baelfire?” “No!”

“Is the grass green today?” “No!”

But, eventually he began to branch out, picking up spare vocabulary from conversations he probably wasn’t supposed to be listening to. His second word was damn. And his third was sorry. 

“Most babies learn ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ first,” Mary Margaret sighs as she settles him into the playpen next to Emma with a pointed look at David. 

“Most babies have mommies and daddies there to encourage that,” David points out.

And boy, do the two of them encourage Emma. Bae thinks it’s funny watching the two of them try to persuade her to utter her first words, a string of nonsense syllables that would make them smile. That felt real silly to him. Wouldn’t it be better if Emma’s first word was something she could get some use out of?

Bae liked ‘no’ - had found it quite useful, even - and he had managed to pick up a few other words that got him things he wanted, or at the very least some attention.

And he wasn’t afraid to use those words either.

He would babble away as he followed his mother around the house, making up stories about a dog he saw down the road as she went about cleaning the kitchen, nodding along with him in an attempt to make him feel heard.

He would tell Mrs. Nolan stories too, and she would ask questions and teach him new words that he could sprinkle into his vocabulary. Rumple could always tell when Milah had pawned their son off on the neighbors because he always came back over-using a new word or phrase. 

And because of that Bae learned a few new words from his father, too. Words he probably wasn’t supposed to hear, slipping out from under the cracks of closed doors, well past his bedtime, after having climbed out of his crib to be closer to his parents. Not because he was afraid of the dark. He wasn’t. Not at all. Still, he didn’t like the shadows outside his window.

He learned words like ‘cheat’. Words like ‘bitch’. Words that made Mary Margaret blush and David Nolan sternly ban him from saying those words, especially around Emma. 

He tried, really hard to keep those words to himself. He didn’t like the way strangers would turn to look at him and his mother in the grocery store when he said them, and he really didn’t like the way the Nolans would fuss at him when they slipped out, but sometimes they just slipped out. Bae liked to talk, and he didn’t like to limit himself.

But he did around baby Emma.

He tried to enthusiastically share his words with her, because she would be talking any day now, and then wouldn’t it be fun to have one more person he could talk to? One more person to ask questions about his stories, and maybe make up a few for him to listen to as well, and who definitely wouldn’t judge him if he occasionally let a bad word slip out.

But unlike the unimaginative Nolans, Bae wanted Emma’s first word to be something fun.

“Mama!” Mary Margaret would cheer when Emma started to coo.

“Dada!” David would object even louder.

“Princess,” Bae would whisper when no one was listening, hoping maybe she might repeat it back to him. “Pirate. Knight. Horse.”

But she didn’t take any of his suggestions, and she didn’t take her parents, either.

Because unlike Bae, Emma Nolan didn’t really have anything to say. She would twist her blonde pony tails around her finger as she listened to the books David read her, the songs Mary Margaret sang to her, the stories Bae made up when they were playing with her dolls, and she didn’t really have anything to add. So she stayed silent.

“You’ll never guess what Bae said today,” Mary Margaret said, her tone tight as she handed him back over to Milah after having babysat him for two hours longer than she had initially agreed to. “It started with an F and it wasn’t firetruck.”

Bae tried his best to smile sweetly up at his mother, who just shook her head defeated as she made an attempt to scold him. It was hard though, because they both knew he had learned that word from her. 

So as time went on, and Emma got closer and closer to saying her first words, the Nolans offered to watch Bae less and less. Sometimes he would make his way across the street with his ball that he and Emma would sit and roll back and forth, and beg Mary Margaret to let him play with his friend. And she would relent, but watch him carefully, listening to make sure his stories didn’t include any naughty words.

Other times, though, when he stood on his tiptoes to see over the gate to where Mr. Nolan was working in the front yard, he would ask if Emma could come out and play with him, and David would shake his head no and say, “Sorry, not today, Bae.”

Those days made Bae want to use all the naughty words he had learned from listening at doors.

“That’s what happens, Bae,” his mother explained while he complained, “If you’re an unpleasant person people don’t want to be around you.”

She sounded tired today. Had been up late arguing with his dad again. It wasn’t fair that they got to stay up past bedtime to scream and shout, but when Bae gave it a go, he got in trouble.

“Emma wants to be around me, she didn’t say that,” he mumbled, and it was true, because Emma didn’t say much of anything. “If I’m not around, her first word is going to be something stupid, like “mom” or “dad”.”

“Don’t say stupid,” his mom corrected. 

So even though he wasn’t supposed to go over and play anymore, he still waved an enthusiastic hello every time he passed the Nolan’s gate. He would ask Mary Margaret every morning that he saw her out in the yard, “Has Emma said her first word yet?”

"No, but she’s been mumbling a lot lately,” Mrs. Nolan would smile sadly at him. “Should be soon.”

“Did she say anything today?” he asked David who paused thoughtfully and looked around to see where the adult Bae was supposed to be with was.

“No, Bae, not today.”

And occasionally he would still see Emma while they were out on a family walk, and he would run over from his yard with a big grin and ask, “Can I share a new word with her?”

And the Nolans would reluctantly agree, and Emma would smile sweetly as she hugged him hello and Bae tried not to notice the way Mr. Nolan pulled her away from him quickly. 

“Only if it’s polite,” Mary Margaret would remind him.

“Where’s your mom?” David asked, less interested in what Bae had to say.

“Today I learned the word ‘quest’,” he said to Emma with a grin. “A quest is a big adventure. We’ll go on lots of those one day. Do you want to say quest?”

And Emma just smiled and shook her head, teasing him with that look. And he just knew she was saving her first word for something really good.

Because unlike the Nolans, Bae noticed how attentive she was to everything anyone said. He noticed how responsive she was when asked to do things. He noticed, and he realized that she wasn’t talking, but she was understanding. And so he would have to find a better word for her to say than quest. Because he knew when he found just the right exciting word, she would speak. He just had to offer her the right word first.

“That’s a very nice word, Bae,” Mary Margaret said, tugging her daughter along by her hand. “But we have to get going.”

“You should probably head home,” David told him, “We’re headed to the park and you shouldn’t be out in the street without an adult.”

Bae shrugged, turning back to his house with his ball tucked under his arm.

“Bye, Bae!”

They all froze, everyone turning to look back at Emma who was biting her lip to keep from smiling, hands clutching the hem of her dress as she wiggled from side to side with joy. 

“Did she just-?”

“Emma, sweetie, what did you say?”

And that was Bae’s very first, real, permanent memory. Years later he would tell people it was something silly, like playing astronaut in his closet or hiding from the storm that hit town a month later. He didn’t want anyone to know how much he cherished that memory. 

Emma Nolan’s first word was his name.


	4. Running Away

Emma Nolan was the only one who noticed the first time Bae tried to run away from home. 

She was almost four and her mom had agreed to let her sit outside in the yard on her own to draw on the sidewalk with her brand-new pastel chalk, as long as she promised to stay in the yard and to come get Mrs. Nolan if anything went wrong. 

So she sat, humming a tune from her current favorite Disney movie, drawing pictures of her stuffed animals on the front walkway and wishing Bae was here to come up with stories about them.

She wasn’t supposed to play with Bae when her parents weren’t around. Her dad said it was because he was a boy, but her mom didn’t have those same concerns about August, so she was pretty sure that wasn’t it. 

And it wasn’t like she could go over to his house. She didn’t like his house. But sometimes, when her mom let her sit outside with her chalk, he would come out through the door and over to their yard to play with her. He would hop the fence - because Bae didn’t seem to know how gates worked - and draw pictures for her of whatever she requested. Sometimes Emma didn’t know if she liked his stories more, or just the fact that he did whatever she asked of him. At Emma’s house she was always being bossed around by her parents. But with Bae she could be as bossy as she wanted and he never said no. 

It was one of those days, where she was looking longingly at the Gold’s front door, when she watched him slip outside, trying very hard to shut the door quietly behind him, despite having to stretch a bit to reach the handle. 

She grinned, standing up on her tippy toes to wave at him over the gate. “Come draw with me, Bae!”

He turned to look at her, his eyes wide as if he’d just been caught doing something bad, as he slunk over to the fence. “I can’t today, Em, I’ve got something I gotta do.”

“Tomorrow then?” she asked. Tomorrow was Saturday and her mom had said they could go to the park if Emma was really good this week.

“Probably not then, either. I’m not going to be here,” he explained, readjusting the little red backpack he had thrown over his shoulder. “I’m running away.”

“To where?” she asked thoughtfully.

“I don’t know yet,” he confided, “But it’s gotta be better than here. See ya’!”

“Wait!” she hollers after him as he turns to walk down the sidewalk away from her yard. “Give me a sec to get my things. I’ll go with ya’!”

And so she sneaks back into the house, extra quiet so that her mom doesn’t hear her sneaking past the kitchen. She grabs her own backpack out of her closet and begins to fill it with the essentials. She manages to fit a doll and her blanket before she realizes that the bag is getting pretty full and she still hasn’t packed any food yet, so she creeps back to the kitchen and crawls around the island so her mom can’t see her. The only thing she can reach in the pantry without asking for help is a box of crackers, and so she shoves it into her backpack, sneaking away without shutting the pantry door so that her mom doesn’t hear.

Bae is still waiting by the front gate when she gets outside, shifting nervously on his feet as he watches her unlatch the gate.

“You sure you want to come?” he asked as she takes his hand in hers. “I’m not coming back.”

“Yeah, let’s go on an adventure,” she says with a grin as they continue down the sidewalk away from the only world they’ve ever known.

They end up at the park, finally both tall enough for the big kid swings, they sit next to each other as Bae draws circles in the dirt with the toe of his shoe and Emma pushes herself higher and higher on the swings - because mommy and daddy are not here to tell her to be careful today.

“You don’t want to swing with me?” she finally asks, slowing down to get a better look at Bae, who looks like he might be crying. 

He shakes his head and turns away, rubbing at his eyes with the cuffs of his sleeves. 

“Where are we going to run away to?” she asks hopefully, “Or are we just going to live in the park?”

He smiles at her, shrugs and then whispers, “Where do you want to go?”

She’s never thought about that before. The word ‘go’ is new and exciting to her. She goes places with her parents, sure, but this is different. Those are all places they want to go. Where does Emma want to go?

“Maybe to a castle?” she suggests, thinking about all the stories he tells her, about princesses and dragons and adventures. She could be a princess. He could be a knight or something. That could be a fun time.

He laughs, “Not a lot of castles in Storybrooke.”

“Alright,” she says with a huff, “Where were you going to go?”

He looks at her long and hard in that moment, his face softening a bit as he realizes she hasn’t yet grasped the severity of what’s happening. “I was thinking maybe a pirate ship.”

“There are no girls on pirate ships, Bae!” she wails, “I can’t go with you!”

He laughs, reaching out to hug her. “Of course there are, Em. Some of the best pirates were girls. Like Mary Read and Grace O'Malley. You’ll make a great pirate, we both will.”

She nods, solemnly, because he would know. Bae knows everything. Bae even knows the things you aren’t supposed to know. Like how to jimmy the locks on some of the doors at her house and also how to turn on the stove by himself. And start a car. And get to the library. And also what it means when grown-ups say they need ‘alone time’.

“You sure you’re ready to be a pirate?” he asks, and his smile is meant to make her feel better, but it’s weak and nervous, and that just makes her worry. Because Bae’s smile is a constant, like David tucking her in at night or Mary Margaret making her brush her teeth in the morning. 

“Yeah, I brought my blanket and my doll, and I even packed some crackers in case we get hungry. Hey, Bae, why are we running away again?”

He looks away quickly, this time wiping at his eyes even more frantically and she is positive he is crying. 

“We’re not,” he manages to mumble, “I am. You’re gonna go home.”

She shakes her head, no, this is their adventure. He’s not going to steal it from her just because he’s older, and a boy, and thought of it first.

“Emma, you can’t be a pirate, your parents would miss you too much,” he says, reaching out and pushing her shoulder so that the swing begins to swirl and bump into him on it’s way back. 

“What about you parents?” she asks, looking over to the two packed backpacks sitting by the edge of the swings. “Won’t they miss you?”

Bae shrugs. “Not really.”

“I bet they would,” she assures him, now starting to doubt this whole ‘running away’ plan because he’s right, their parents would miss them too much. And being a pirate - or a princess, Emma still secretly hopes - might be a lot of fun, but it wasn’t worth making their parents sad. “And also, I would miss you.”

So he agrees to walk her back to their block. And he agrees to help her with her chalk drawings. He even agrees to put his backpack back inside before they play, so Emma knows he’s really changed his mind about running away.

She stands awkwardly in the front entryway of the Gold house as Bae pushes the door open, both his parents standing in the little living room facing each other and yelling words Emma doesn’t recognize, but don’t sound very nice.

They hadn’t noticed he was gone.

But as he steps inside and sits his bag down, glaring defiantly at the two adults there, Emma gets the feeling that this had all been a test. And Mr. and Mrs. Gold had failed it terribly.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Gold says with a shake of her head, bending down to kiss Bae on top of his head. And Emma realizes that she also has a backpack slung over her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Bae.”

And then she is walking through the front door and past Emma, as if she can’t even see Emma standing there in the doorway. 

Over the years Bae would pack his bag and storm out many more times, each argument getting louder the older he got. He would climb in through her window and beg her to come with him. He would grumble and groan when she tore up the bus tickets she found in his locker. He would make persuasive arguments to her, and his father, and his other authority figures that he couldn’t have even imagined having to answer to yet. 

But today, Emma was here for the very first time he tried to run away. And the very last time he ever saw his mother.


	5. School

Bae was there half an hour early to walk Emma down the block on her first day of school. 

David Nolan was not happy about it one bit.

“Look at that goofy grin, are you really going to say no to that?” Mary Margaret asked, glancing over at Bae, waiting patiently in their front entryway. He had combed his impossibly curly hair to the best of his ability and was wearing a collared shit that looked a little too big for him, jeans with holes already worn through the knees, and sneakers with laces so terribly knotted that they were impossible to tie. 

And David had thought, _ hell yeah, I’m going to say no! _

But then his little girl had danced down the stairs in the outfit she had stayed up late last night to pick out with Mary Margaret. And she hadn’t cared one bit about him, or her mother, or the new backpack filled to the brim with all her first-day-of-school supplies - that was another thing, where was Bae’s backpack? - instead Emma had run right up to the neighbor boy and wrapped him in a big hug and proceeded to tell him all about her new shoes. And David had to give the boy credit, because he had stopped caring about those damn shoes the moment they had left the store, but Bae seemed enraptured by the story. It was a look David knew all too well, and it was not one he felt at all comfortable with Baelfire Gold directing toward his daughter. 

Mary Margaret made a big deal out of first-day pictures, posing Emma in just about every room in the house, Bae following behind her like a puppy, getting dirt on the floors. They took a picture of her holding up a big letter K - for kindergarten - and a chalkboard with all her likes and dislikes written on it. They took pictures with and without her backpack, and even a few with her matching lunchbox.

And Bae stood patiently next to David, waiting for them to finish.

“I bet your dad doesn’t make you do all this,” David mumbled, trying to start up a conversation with the world’s most talkative boy - who had suddenly gone very quiet this last year. The neighborhood didn’t really talk about it, but everyone had noticed Bae’s sudden disinterest in telling stories and oversharing about his life. 

“Pictures?” the first-grader asked, tilting his head up to look at David. “Nah, pop doesn’t really take pictures.”

And before David could say something else, Mary Margaret had stopped what she was doing and looked over at the two of them with concern in her eyes. “Not at all?”

Bae shrugged, looking back and forth between the two adults as he bit his lip. “We took a picture of me at the courthouse last week, but it was more for my custody paperwork that we have to send to the school. I don’t think we got to keep a copy.”

Well, apparently, that just wouldn’t do, and so the Nolans redid their first day of school photo-shoot, adding Bae to their pictures as they moved around the house. And though they didn’t have a big #1 for him to hold up, or his very own chalkboard to fill out, they did take one of him and Emma hugging and holding up the chalkboard that had been erased quickly so that Mary Margaret could write in the words ‘best friends.’

And Bae was rather indifferent to the whole ordeal, but it seemed to make the Nolans happy, and it definitely made Emma happy, so he went right along with it. A few weeks later he would see one of the pictures framed above the living room fireplace at his own house, but he and his dad would never talk about it. 

For today, he prepped her on the walk, quizzing her about the teachers’ names and how to get to the cafeteria. He was no expert, but he had been in Mrs. Holt’s class last year and so he filled Emma in on everything he could remember as she stared at him with those big blue eyes that expected him to have all the answers. She was always so excited about everything, but as he dropped her off at the front office, she looked completely panicked as he melted into the crowd to find his friends. 

He picked her back up again at the end of the day, she was waiting patiently on the sidewalk out front for him to take her hand and walk her back to their block, little lunchbox gripped in her other hand and first-day-of-school shoes clicking loudly on the sidewalk.

“So how did it go?” he asks.

“I don’t like school,” she mumbles, a complete one-eighty from the chipper attitude she’d had this morning. And that was weird, because Bae loved school. School was the best - he got a free lunch and learned about exciting things and sometimes teachers would even give him compliments like ‘gifted’ or ‘has potential’. 

“What happened?” he wonders, stopping outside the gate, knowing he can’t let her go into the Nolan house like this. Her parents would fuss and they’d prod and they’d only make it worse. 

She shakes her head and looks like she’s about to cry. “There’s this boy in my class. He’s kinda a jerk. He took my purple crayon and broke it. And when I tried to tell on him he just called me a tattle-tale. And then we read the Ugly Duckling at story time and he started calling me Swan!”

Bae was confused. Had they read the same Ugly Duckling?

“That’s a good thing, Emma,” he tried to explain, “The swan is beautiful at the end.”

“He said I look like a swan because I have a long neck. And then he made honking noises and the rest of the class laughed.”

“Maybe he likes you,” Bae offered. That logic had never made sense to him, but adults always seemed to say it. “Maybe he wanted to call you a swan because he thinks you're pretty, but he was too afraid to say it.”

She sniffles, “You think so?”

Bae shrugs. “I think if he keeps picking on you, you come get me and I’ll take care of it.”

“You don’t think I look like a Swan, do you?”

He shakes his head. No, she was tiny and blonde as a sunflower, rounded cheeks and pudgy arms giving her the look of being sort of soft and fluffy. “You’re more of a duckling to me.”

“You know, I never got my purple crayon back,” she pouts as they head inside where the Nolans wait eagerly to pry questions about her first day from her. And Mary Margaret asks Bae a few questions about his first day, too. 

But Emma just shrugs and tells them she’ll have to give it another go tomorrow before she makes up her mind about it. And when she tells them not to worry, because Bae is going to take care of the boy who is bullying her, he sees their eyes shift to him uncomfortably, so he does his best to look harmless so they’ll let him stay and color with Emma. Bae likes to draw, and the Nolans have more art supplies than the school, so Bae always likes when Emma suggests they color together. Today, Bae shows her how to mix colors while she is drawing.

“See,” he says as he finishes shading the picture. “If you put the blue crayon over the red crayon, it makes purple.”

It also makes a big smile on Emma’s face, which is perhaps better than the color purple.

“Bae, can I talk to you?” David asks, but it isn’t really a question, so he jumps down from the high chairs around the Nolans’ kitchen island and walks out onto the porch with Emma’s dad.

“Thank you for walking Emma to school today, but you don’t have to anymore. Mrs. Nolan and I are going to drive Emma tomorrow. We want to meet her teacher and ask about this boy who is bullying her. And we think it’s probably best you stayed out of that situation.”

It probably was best. It wasn’t going to happen. But it probably would have been better.

He nods.

“You should probably get home to your father now,” Mr. Nolan prompts, giving him that expecting look.

Bae nods again.

He pokes his head in through the doorway to wave goodbye to Emma.

“Bye, Duckie,” he calls and she waves back enthusiastically. 

So Bae doesn’t walk Emma to school the next day. Or the day after. In fact, the Nolans don’t let him walk Emma to school again until she’s in second grade and it becomes incredibly clear that they have two options when it comes to the persistent neighbor boy: let him be in Emma’s life or sell the house and move far away. 

But he walks her home every day, because they can’t really stop him and even though he’s barley seven, he already knows it. 

And it’s not like he doesn’t hear the rumors. He knows what the teachers say about him when they think he’s not listening. What the other parents say in the carpool line or when handing out birthday party invitations. Storybrooke is a small town, and he knows what his neighbors think of the Gold family - the legacy his mother left behind and his father was managing to uphold despite not wanting to - so he knows that no one expects him to stay in school long. But he does. He is there for Emma’s first day of kindergarten, and her first day of first grade, and her first day of second. He is there for every first day from elementary to high, upholding a longstanding tradition the two of them have - he gives her a purple crayon every first day, calls her Duckie, and offers to take care of any bullies she might be facing. And it’s cute at first, but she grows rather tired of it by the time they’re in their teens.

Until senior year hits and Bae isn’t there for her first day anymore.


	6. Tooth

Emma is there when Bae loses his first tooth. She wishes she wasn’t, because it’s a bloody mess, but he loses it because of her, so it seems only fair she should have to witness it. 

His bottom incisor has been wiggly for weeks, she’s jealous of the way he can almost stick his tongue through his teeth and loves the way it whistles sometimes when he talks. She can’t wait to lose her first tooth, Mary Margaret had already told her all about the tooth fairy!

Bae also seems excited about losing his first tooth, but for different reasons. He likes that he can make it bleed when he pushes it hard enough. Likes the way it freaks out his teachers when he twists it sideways in his mouth, hanging on by just a thread. Emma suggests all sorts of ways he can get rid of it, her eyes on that prize money under the pillow, but Bae doesn’t want to get rid of it. He likes his wiggly tooth; it would be no good to him outside of his mouth. 

He’s careful at lunch, to only eat soft foods - he gives her his apple and she doesn’t complain - and occasionally she’ll look over at him out of the corner of her eye and catch him gingerly touching the tooth with his finger.

“You want my bread?” she asks, offering up one of the Hawaiian rolls her mom put in her lunch today, worried because Bae seems more focused on his loose tooth than actually eating anything.

“No, you need that,” she hears a familiar voice taunt, “Gotta save the bread for the Swans.”

Bae looks up too, his hands falling away from his loose tooth as his eyes lock on to Killian Jones, making honking noises next to their picnic table. 

“Shut up, Jones,” he mumbles, as Emma tucks her bread back into her lunch box and looks away. Mary Margaret had agreed with Bae, she said Killian Jones was just a silly little boy who didn’t know how to talk about his feelings. Everyone said that he must be teasing her because he liked her, but if that were the case, she didn’t like him. It wasn’t nice, and what’s worse, she always got in trouble when she retaliated.

So she kept her head down and tried to ignore the taunting that had only gotten worse once the two of them had moved into the numbered grades. 

“You gonna make me, Neal?” Killian taunts. 

Bae had started going by his middle name at school. He’d actually been doing it for a while now, and everyone just went along with it like it wasn’t the weirdest thing in the world. Emma couldn’t imagine going by her middle name - Odette was just funny sounding - Emma was what her parents called her, and she loved it more than anything.

Then again, she suspected Bae’s sudden urge to be Neal instead of Bae had something to do with his parents, too.

“I might,” Bae says, standing up from the table and straightening his spine so that he was his full four feet tall. Bae hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, which Emma liked because it meant he wasn’t taller than her anymore, but Bae didn’t because it meant all the other boys were. 

“Yeah?” Killian asks with a raised eyebrow, and Emma knows then that he has bitten off more than he can chew. Boys like Killian liked to throw around insults and then hide behind their teachers. Boys like Killian, with big brothers and loving parents, could take taunt after taunt, but always left with the upper hand.

Boys like Bae threw fists and worried about the consequences later.

“You gonna leave her alone?” Bae asked, one last time as he stepped forward, tilting his chin up to meet Killian’s eyes unblinking. 

Killian shook his head no, unaware of what was coming next.

Emma knew, as she ducked under the table, the soft thud of knuckle hitting cheekbone soon drowned out by the roar of the other children, pounding footsteps as everyone gathered across the school yard, forming a circle so tight Emma could no longer see the scuffle happening inside. 

She could, however, hear Killian’s protests loud and clear over the cheering of the other children. So could the teachers who came to break up the fight, scattering the students as they pulled Bae and Killian apart, gripping both boys by their shirt collars as they dragged them through the school yard and into the office.

Bae offered her a gap-toothed grin as he passed, blood dripping from his lip, coating his knuckles, a bruise swelling around his eye, as they passed. 

“I lost my tooth,” he whispered as he was yanked forward by the teacher.

After school, Emma brought him back to her house. She knew her parents didn’t like him spending so much time there. She’d heard hushed arguments about “bad influences” and “puberty hormones” that she didn’t fully understand. But at the end of the day, Mary Margaret didn’t like Bae alone at his own house until all hours of the evening, and David reluctantly admitted that Bae was very good at helping Emma with her homework. She still wasn’t allowed to walk to the library with him, and they could only go to the park for an hour after school before her mom came looking for them, but the Nolans had finally accepted that Bae and his host of problems weren’t going anywhere any time soon, so long as Emma had something to say about it.

“Guess what?!” she chirped as she entered the kitchen, both her parents looking up and taking in their perfect princess and the bruised and bloody neighbor boy trailing after her like a storm cloud. 

Both of them don’t look away from Bae as Mary Margaret finally finds the courage to ask, “What, honey?”

“Bae lost his first tooth!”

Bae grins, poking his tongue out through the hole in his smile as he holds up the little plastic bag the nurse gave him with his tiny baby tooth safely inside.

“Well, congratulations, Bae,” Mary Margaret smiles. 

“Now he gets a visit from the tooth fairy!” Emma cheered. 

“The tooth fairy isn’t real,” he laughs and the room falls silent.

“Who told you that?” David asks, both Nolan parents gauging their daughter for a reaction. Because as much as they hate it, she always seems to believe Bae, even when sometimes he says the most ridiculous things.

“No one told me,” he shrugs, “It’s just… like… not real.”

“Not uh!” Emma argued back.

“Uh huh!” he says, “If she was I would have pulled out all my teeth by now to pay my library fines. They won’t let me check out books until I pay my late fee, but I can’t because I don’t have any money and the tooth fairy isn’t real!”

“Yeah she is,” Emma protested, furrowing her brow in annoyance. “You’ll see, when you put that tooth under your pillow tonight, she’s going to leave you a dollar and then you’ll see.”

And both David and Mary Margaret exchanged an uncomfortable look because they both knew, just like Bae, that all he would find under his pillow tomorrow morning was the same tooth he left there the night before. 

“Baby, sometimes the tooth fairy doesn't visit every house…” David began, not sure where to go from there.

“Why not?” Emma asked, neither of her parents sure how to answer that one. 

Because life was unfair? Because some houses weren’t as full of laughter and love and pixie dust as theirs? Because Bae had drawn a very short straw in life and was probably never going to get a shot at a redo?

But Emma was looking at them with her baby blue eyes and they were going to have to answer her.

“Because my dad sets out fairy traps,” Bae explained, drawing Emma’s attention away from her parents. “Yeah, he hates the things. They leave glitter everywhere, and he doesn’t trust them with his teeth. So she can’t get in to my house.”

“Oh,” Emma says thoughtfully as David and Mary Margaret both silently thank Bae across the kitchen. “I have an idea! What if you left your tooth here? Under my pillow? Then she would be able to leave you a dollar!”

Bae grins mischievously at the Nolans before shaking his head. “I don’t think it works that way, Em. She’d probably think you were trying to trick her, and you can’t trick fairies.”

“He’s right,” David says as his wife smacks him in the shoulder.

“But we could give it a try, just to see,” Mary Margaret corrects.

Emma liked that idea, and so she is grinning happily as she drags Bae out into the backyard to play on the swing set that David built for her last birthday. 

“Make sure to tell the tooth fairy, I owe the public library four-twenty-five,” Bae grins at David as he passes and it is the first time he’s ever felt like he has any control over an adult. And Bae likes that feeling.

The next morning when Bae shows up again at the Nolan’s house Emma greets him with a hug and the biggest smile he’s ever seen.

“I told you she was real!” she says as they come into the kitchen where Mary Margaret is making pancakes, David Nolan glaring at him over his morning paper. “I told you, and it’s even better than I thought.”

Emma pulls a little pink card off the counter, handing it to Bae who opens it in a puff of glitter. He steps back quickly, but the damage is done, it’s all over his shirt as he scrambles to catch the plastic gift card that slips out of it. Fifty dollars for Barnes and Noble.

“The tooth fairy knows that you’re going to lose a lot of teeth over the next couple years,” Mary Margaret explains as she begins to fill a second plate with eggs and pancakes for Bae. “She knows she probably won’t be able to get to you for most of them - because of the fairy traps - so this is for all of them. Just in case.”

Bae waits until Emma is off with her mom, helping clean up the mess at breakfast before he approaches the subject with David.

“You know people only have twenty baby teeth.”

“That’s a fun fact, Bae,” David smiles, setting his paper down and doing his best not to match the hostile glare coming from across the table. Mary Margaret says they have to feel bad for the boy, says some of the children who most need love are the least lovable, or some other teacher saying like that. And David does feel bad, even likes Bae’s pluckiness at times, he just doesn’t want it anywhere near his daughter. So he tries to smile as he sips his coffee making small talk.

“It is a fun fact. One The tooth fairy would know about.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“Then why did she overpay me by about thirty dollars?” Bae challenges.

“Because the tooth fairy likes smart boys that read, Bae,” David offers, and then thinks to add, “And she also likes boys who keep Killian Jones away from Emma Nolan.”

“Seems fair,” Bae says with a shrug, putting his gift card in his pocket as he takes his plate over to the sink where Emma is chatting away with her mother about what she is going to do when she feels her first tooth start to wiggle. 

Emma was there when Bae lost his first tooth, and more importantly, the Nolans were there when Bae lost his first tooth. So Bae spends the next five years making sure that anyone who dares to tell Emma Nolan that the tooth fairy wasn’t real would be getting their own visit from the tooth fairy that same night. 


	7. Kiss

Bae was there for Emma Nolan’s first kiss and he can’t believe how mortified he is by the sight. 

He’s just trying to retrieve his basketball during recess, his friends shouting at him because it was his own terrible shot that had caused the ball to ricochet wildly away from the court, and so it is his responsibility to retrieve it. 

But when he creeps around the brick wall at the edge of the basketball courts he finds his friend, her lips pressed against Graham Humbert’s, eyes squeezed tightly shut as she stands on her tippy toes and holds her hands folded behind her back.

Bae feels his face go red, a hot and hateful blush creeping out from under his collar and up to color his cheeks. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be seeing this. And he should definitely leave before she notices him. 

It’s not like Bae hasn’t seen kissing before - he’s in his last year of elementary school, about to move on to middle, and so he’s seen plenty of kissing - and has even kissed a few girls of his own. Between Bae’s distant memories of his mother and the things she got up to, and the videos they all gathered around Peter’s computer to watch when his parents weren’t home, Bae knows that what Emma Nolan is doing out behind the school building isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s kind of sweet. Incredibly innocent.

And that’s what horrifies Bae. 

He feels uncomfortable and he can’t quite put words to it. 

“Neal! Are you getting the damn ball or not?” He hears Felix yell from the court, loud enough to startle Emma and Graham into jumping feet apart, Bae still unable to move from his slack-jawed spot.

“Sorry,” he mumbles quickly before turning and rushing back to the basketball court. 

“Please don’t tell my parents,” she begs him as they walk home. He isn’t holding her hand anymore. They stopped that routine back in third grade when kids had started teasing them for it, but he still walks with his shoulder pressed comfortably close to hers. 

“Why would I tell your parents?” he laughs. 

She shrugs. 

“I mean it’s not like it was a big deal,” he says, feeling his face grow warm again, though he isn’t sure why. “It wasn’t even a real kiss.”

“Was so a real kiss!” she argues back.

He shakes his head sadly at her with that knowing look. He knows how mad that look makes her and he can’t help it when she gets like this. 

“It was so!” she says, stopping her walk to stomp her foot.

“Real kisses have tongue,” he tells her, continuing to walk as she scrambles to catch up. “You’ll see when you get older.”

“You’re not that much older,” she glares as they arrive at her front porch, hanging their bags on the hooks inside the Nolan’s entryway and then heading to the kitchen for an after-school snack. Mr. Nolan is already home from the animal shelter and is putting away groceries right next to them, so Bae assumes their conversation is over.

But he just can’t help himself.

“I’m going to be in middle school next year,” he tells her as she puts a handful of popcorn onto a napkin in front of him and then picks a few pieces out of the bag for herself. “So I think I would know.”

And Emma, God love her, is far too stubborn to let him win. She’d rather shoot herself in the foot than let Bae be right about this. And so she calls his bluff.

“Daddy,” she says turning to David sweetly. “Bae says real kisses have to have tongue, but it counts if it’s just a peck on the lips, right?”

David looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm and Bae tries to figure out just how fast he would have to run to get back through the front door before Mr. Nolan could catch him. 

They sit there in stunned silence for a moment, Emma really enjoying the tension she’s just created between her friend and her father, while the other two both contemplate how likely they are to be on the local news tonight.

“Well, I have to go,” Bae says, sliding out of his chair and creeping back towards the door.

“No you don’t.” And David’s voice is so full of ice that Bae is inclined to listen. “Sit back down.”

And so they both have to listen as David explains to them that a ‘real’ kiss has feelings behind it. A ‘real’ kiss has nothing to do with how intimate it is, and everything to do with how much the two people care about each other. No, Bae, not all meaningful kisses have tongue. And, no, Emma, you shouldn’t be kissing boys you don’t care about behind the school building during recess. And, oh, thank God, it was Graham Humbert and not… Well, just thank God is all. 

Bae thinks the conversation is over, thinks David Nolan might even let him live after all that, but it isn’t, because suddenly his little conversation has very big consequences.

For starters, Emma is grounded. She isn’t allowed to come out and play with him until the end of the quarter. He can stay and do homework, but that is it. No weekend bike rides to the park. No hanging out in their front yards tossing a football back and forth or drawing dragons on the sidewalk in chalk. Emma figures out that she can see him from her bedroom window, though, if he sits on the roof of his dad’s house and waves.

The second unintended consequence is the recess yard gets a whole lot smaller. Students aren’t allowed to play in the back field without teacher supervision anymore. And even though no one knows it’s his fault, he knows, and feels embarrassed whenever his friends complain. They hate having to share their recess yard with the younger kids, hate that Emma and Graham and Killian are all crowded onto their basketball courts getting in the way of their games. And Bae just mumbles a weak defense, “We aren’t that much older, you know.”

But the most surprising effect of his conversation with David is that Bae’s dad actually comes home from the shop earlier now.  _ Someone _ had finally said something to Mr. Gold about the effects of leaving his son unattended all the time. It wasn’t his fault, to be sure, they were barely making ends meet before Mr. Gold had left the army. When Milah left, Rumple had put in his retirement paperwork immediately, bought a small pawn shop near the edge of town, and was doing his best to be both the breadwinner and the caretaker. And he wasn’t being very successful at either. 

So when _ someone _ said something to him about his boy and the path Bae was headed toward, Rumple started closing the shop at five and making sure he was home to attempt making dinner and awkward small talk with his son. 

“You know why you can’t say things like that to the Nolan girl?” his dad asked halfheartedly as they sat around the table eating microwaved noodles that tasted just a little burnt. Nothing like the dinners Bae was no longer invited to at the Nolans’. 

But honestly, no, Bae didn’t know. It seemed a little ridiculous that Emma didn’t know about these things. Did girls not get curious about them, too?

“Emma Nolan hasn’t been through what you’ve been through,” his dad explained, and that was the closest Rumple ever got to bringing up his ex-wife. “She’s a little sheltered, Bae, and her parents would like to keep it that way for as long as possible. Everyone learns about life at a different pace, son, and you can’t go speeding up everyone else's pace just cause you’re a curious kid. Remember when Killian Jones told Emma that Santa wasn’t real? That’s kind of what you’re doing, but with sex. Let her believe her fairy tale for just a little bit longer.”

Bae sulks as he pours more hot sauce into the noodles to make them a little more palatable. “All I said was real kisses have tongue and I stand by it.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” his dad laughed. “Son, you’re not even a teenager yet, what would you know about ‘real’ anything?”

That makes Bae squint across the table at his dad in anger, because since he was very young Bae has always prided himself on knowing a lot. He knows plenty of stuff about lots of things, and he doesn’t like his father implying that he might be stupid. He’s actually the top in his class, and he tells his dad so. 

“Yes, Bae, you’re incredibly book smart,” Rumple concedes with a grin, “But you’ve got a lot to learn about life. I’m not an idiot, I know you’ve already had your first kiss, and you’re not very good at clearing the internet history either, but let me tell you, real kisses, no matter what you think, have to mean something to both of you. Have you ever kissed a girl and felt butterflies in your stomach? Ever kissed a girl and felt your breath catch in your throat because of just how much she overwhelms you? Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m guessing you shouldn’t be giving Emma Nolan any crap, because you’ve never had a real kiss either.”

And so when he was finally allowed to hang out with Emma again he apologized for teasing her about her kiss. And she told him it was okay, he was right, it wasn’t a real kiss. And they had laughed about it until they were both breathless.

And then everything had gotten very quiet, and she had leaned in and pressed her lips against his. A quick peck, and nothing more, the edges of her lips turning up into a smile as she pulled away.

“What was that for?” he asked, feeling butterflies twist in his stomach, an overwhelming urge rising up in him that seemed to be clouding his brain more and more these days. 

She shrugged. “Just felt like it. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a _ real _ kiss.”

And they had laughed some more. But as Bae lay awake that night thinking about it, he realized he might have witnessed Emma Nolan’s first _technical_ kiss, but she had been his first  _ real _ kiss.


	8. Broken Bone

When Bae broke his first bone, Emma was the only one there to call 911.

It was the summer before Emma went to middle school and she is hanging out with Bae at the local skate park - which is all but abandoned on a Tuesday afternoon.

Emma doesn’t really like the skate park, normally it’s full of Bae’s middle school friends who are all just a little too loud, their gazes just a little too feral, and she isn’t very good at skating the concave bowl in her roller blades. 

Bae has changed a lot since he went off to middle school, and while she doesn’t hate it, it does worry her.

For starters, he smells funny, a kind of stale musk underneath the much sharper sour scent of sweat. Mary Margaret said that’s just puberty, and bought him a can of aerosol deodorant, which he wears a little too much of now. But David checks his pockets whenever he comes into the house and confiscates little cardboard boxes and brightly colored plastic lighters from him. 

He dresses differently, too. He doesn’t have any more money than he used to, but now he spends hours with her at the Goodwill, sifting through all the junk for something that ‘speaks to him’ instead of just something that fits. He’s started wearing dark band t-shirts underneath worn flannels and hoodies; switched from his knotted sneakers to a pair of boots he almost never remembers to tie, but gives him an extra inch of height. Because he still hasn’t hit that growth spurt that everyone says is coming.

And she isn’t the biggest fan of his friends, either. She doesn’t trust Peter and his pinched face, always acting like he’s smarter than everyone else. And Felix says a lot of things he shouldn’t in front of her, things she has to ask Bae to explain when they walk home. And the girls aren’t much better. Wendy Darling wears way too much hairspray, and stares at Bae hungrily when she thinks no one is watching. Tinkerbelle Jones - Killian’s older sister who got her nickname in ways Emma still doesn’t fully understand - carries a knife and is constantly threatening to fight with the boys. 

And of course they all call him Neal. Which is still weird to Emma.

But Bae isn’t the only one changing. Emma has started hanging out with Ashley and Ruby a lot more now that she doesn’t have Bae to lean on at school. She’s started having sleepovers where they watch goofy TV shows and talk about which boys they wished they could date. Emma had outgrown her childish crush on August Booth and Graham Humbert, now preferring the brooding bad boys on her favorite TV shows to the clumsy curly-haired boys that seem to run rampant in their neighborhood. And it had nothing to do with Killian Jones, she swore.

Her sense of style was changing, too. Ruby had shown them both how to put on makeup, and they’d traded their sweet knee-length dresses of childhood for something with a higher hemline. Not too high, though, they weren’t Wendy Darling. Mary Margaret had even taken the three of them to get highlights last month, and Emma liked the way her sandy blonde hair now had streaks of actual gold running through it whenever she caught the light just right. 

Bae didn’t seem to have the same misgivings about her friends that she did about his, though. He and Ruby got along great on the few instances he had run into the three of them out together, and he always complimented the many selfies that Emma had taped to the mirror in her room of the three of them making funny faces. One time, on a dare from Ruby, they had even snuck him into one of their sleepovers - the first of many times Emma would watch him scramble through her bedroom window, absolutely no grace or dignity, but enough raw strength to pull himself up over the ledge. 

But today they had the park all to themselves. Emma’s friends had gone away to camp for the summer, and she didn’t ask where his friends had gone because she was just happy they weren’t here. 

She watched as Bae moved effortlessly around the park, guiding the board with the angle of his feet as he dipped down ramps and did tricks off the edge of the bowl. He was getting pretty good on his board this summer, having to do with the fact that he spent sun-up to sun-down hanging out here while his dad was at work and Emma was with her mom. Still, as she watched him shift his weight to tilt the board, gripping the tip with his fingers and landing on his feet as he jogged over to her, she had to admit it was a little impressive.

“Want to give it a go?” he asks as he holds out the board to her and she slowly unbuckles her roller blades so she is standing barefoot on his skateboard. He takes both her hands in his, tugging her forward as she giggles, leading her around the flat, outer edge of the skate park - probably a study in contrasts. She had pink knee pads over her new jeans and he has skinned knees through the holes in his jeans. She has her hair pulled into a ponytail, sticking out from under the purple helmet the Nolans insisted she wear and his long hair is as tangled as ever without a helmet in sight. 

“Try pushing,” he encourages her, letting go of one of her hands so that she can balance as she takes one foot off the bored and lightly taps the concrete. She’s not moving too quickly, but there is still a bit of a sting as her bare foot touches the concrete- she hasn’t built up the callouses that Bae has. 

He lets go of her other hand as she glides away from him, enjoying the breeze on her face as the board tilts slightly to her left and she realizes she doesn’t know how to stop. 

She screams out his name and he’s rushing to grab her as they both go tumbling over the edge of the concrete pool. She’s fine when she hits the bottom, knee pads and helmet suddenly seeming like a good investment, but she has also landed on Bae, and he is moaning swear words quietly to himself. 

“Are you okay?” she asks, pushing herself off him, but it’s clear he isn’t. He has a scrape on his cheek and his leg is sticking out at an odd angle. He bites his lip because he can’t answer her, still breathing heavily.

Finally he answers, “Fuck! That hurts.”

She winces a little at the swear, reaching out to hold him, but he pushes her away.

“Go call the hospital.”

She only has four quarters in her pocket, so she can’t afford to make as many calls as she would have liked from the payphone at the entrance of the skate park, but she calls Mary Margaret after the hospital and asks her mom to phone Bae’s dad.

They let her ride in the ambulance, holding Bae’s hand as they roll the stretcher into an empty slot in the ER and the two of them are left alone while a nurse comes to check him in.

And so Emma is alone with Bae while the nurse asks him questions she quickly learns she didn’t want to hear the answers to. Bae, to his credit, knows this and tries at first to avoid the nurses questions as she makes little checks on his intake form.

“Name?”

“Neal Cassidy.”

“Is that your legal name?”

“Kinda.”

“What’s your legal name?”

“Baelfire Neal Cassidy Gold.”

“Are you a smoker?”

“I broke my leg, what does that have to do with smoking?”

“Just trying to get a complete medical history.”

He gives Emma a sideways glance before whispering, “No, I’m not a smoker.”

“You know, some medications might have severe reactions if you don’t answer these questions honestly.”

“Fine. I smoke. Okay?”

Emma looks away.

“Any recreational drugs or alcohol in the last thirty days?”

“Thirty days - that’s a really long time.”

She glared, “It’s a month.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“And are you sexually active?”

Emma feels her face go red at the thought of Bae even touching a girl for too long. He’s barely thirteen - still a kid just like her - and the question is so unbelievably inappropriate that Emma wishes her parents were here to yell at the nurse for having the nerve to ask such a ridiculous question. Of course he wasn’t sexually active!

“Kinda,” Bae mumbles, his eyes glued to his lap and she feels her grip on his hand loosen involuntarily.

“It’s a yes or no question,” the nurse prods and suddenly Emma realizes what the nurse must be thinking. She lets go of his hand with a gasp, watching her best friend, who was normally so animated and full of grandiose charm, deflate in front of her eyes.

“I mean… I haven't… It’s just… well, kinda,” he stutters.

“We’re going to put 'yes',” the nurse mumbles before standing up and walking away, leaving Bae and Emma to awkwardly not look at each other. 

So by the time the Nolan’s get there, Emma is definitely ready to go home. She is definitely ready to get out of the ER which is loud and overwhelming and full of things she doesn’t want to see and hear.

But they stay and wait with Bae until his dad can get there. And they ask him questions about his skateboarding. And his schoolwork. And his father’s shop.

And they don’t ask him any questions about any of the other things he is apparently doing that none of the adults know about, but probably should.

She’s quiet on the car ride home, unusually so, and so Mary Margaret reaches into the backseat and squeezes her knee.

“Bae is going to be alright, honey, he’s just going to have to wear a cast for a little while.”

“Yeah, this time, next summer, this will all be a distant memory,” David chimes in, “It’s just going to hurt a lot in the meantime.”

She wonders if Bae’s first broken bone hurts as much as her first broken heart.


	9. Date

Bae is there for Emma’s first date. It is also, coincidentally, his first date with David Nolan. 

The two of them sit two booths away from her, hiding behind menus as they pretend to care about their food. 

“What can I get for you boys?” the waitress asks and both of them hush her and cast a nervous look across the restaurant to where Emma and her date sit, laughing and unaware.

“I’ll take the grilled cheese and soup,” Bae says with a shrug, “and, uh… a water.”

There’s a chance Bae actually likes grilled cheese. There's also a chance it’s the cheapest thing on the menu.

“Get what you want, I’m paying for it,” David tells him, watching as Bae reorders the spaghetti and meatballs with a large soda to go along with it. 

“Thank you,” Bae mumbles as the waitress walks away and their attention is able to shift back to Emma. 

“This doesn’t mean I like you all of a sudden,” David reminds him, just to be safe.

“Of course not, sir.”

It’s a new habit of his, calling David ‘sir’, and Mr. Nolan can’t say he actually hates it. It breaks his heart a little bit because he has a strong suspicion of where it’s coming from, but he can’t bring himself to actually tell the neighbor boy that after fourteen years of knowing each other there is no such need for that kind of formality. 

There are lots of rumors circulating the neighborhood since Bae started high school this fall, and David tries hard not to hear them. Because Emma sure doesn’t. It’s sad, but Mary Margaret says that despite Bae’s unusually keen abilities in the classroom, the other teachers have started a betting pool to see how long until he drops out. Mary Margaret has abstained from the bet, but Bae’s math and gym teacher both have dates that are fast approaching in the next two years. It seems like everyone in Storybrooke - save for Mr. Nolan’s poor, somewhat naive, daughter - seem pretty sure that Bae has a future of minimum wage jobs and child support payments to that Darling girl ahead of him. If he’s lucky. 

But Bae seems to have other ideas. David doesn’t tell anyone when he finds the brochures for the Armed Forces in Bae’s backpack while doing one of his standard searches for contraband. And he doesn’t point it out when Bae starts wearing Mr. Gold’s old dog tags. But when all the other parents in the neighborhood start to talk about Bae and that pack of feral boys he runs around with, David can’t help but feel a little proud of the kid who, in the face of all that doubt, still holds onto hope for something better for himself. 

So he doesn’t stop Bae from calling him ‘sir’ and he even offers Bae some community service hours down at the animal shelter when he hears the trouble Bae’s friends are getting up to on the weekends. And even though people say terrible things about Wendy Darling, David actually kind of encourages it. Because as long as Bae is running around with that Darling girl, David doesn’t have to worry about Emma… Or… at least he doesn’t have to worry about Bae with Emma…

They both watch as she tosses her hair back over her shoulder, pretending to be coy but coming across as just a little bit silly, laughing as her date reaches out to brush a smudge of her chocolate milkshake from her lips. 

Killian Jones.

The only thing David and Bae could ever really outwardly agree on.

Killian Jones was a dick.

But Emma had begged, and she had pleaded, and she had cried, and eventually Mary Margaret had reluctantly agreed that she could go on just _one_ date. 

“What harm can come from one little date?” she had asked David sheepishly.

“Kidnapping, murder, drugs, pregnancy,” Bae had began to list off before David could open his moth, earning a punch in the arm from Emma as they finished clearing the dining room table. “What? I’m just saying, I’m a teenage boy, so I think you should listen to me when I say you shouldn’t trust teenage boys.”

“It’s just Killian Jones,” she had rolled her eyes. “I’ve known him practically my whole life.”

“You’ve known Bae your whole life, too,” David chimed in, “Would you go on a date with him?”

It was meant to be sarcastic, but Bae and Snow had both turned eagerly to Emma to see her reaction, both only encouraged as she blushed and made excuses. No she would not. That’s what it boiled down to. She wouldn’t. So he’d laughed it off, and Snow had given him a little look of pity as they all pretended it was just one big joke - for Emma’s sake - who actually thought it was one big joke. 

So she’d spent hours on her hair and makeup - Ruby helping her get her eyeliner just right, Ashley picking out the perfect outfit, while Mary Margaret braided and arranged Emma’s hair for her very first date - and Bae and David had hung awkwardly in the doorway offering encouraging compliments and trying not to panic.

It wasn’t until after the Joneses had come to pick up Emma that David had found Bae outside his house, sneaking a cigarette so that Mr. Gold wouldn’t find out and skin him alive. 

He held the pack out to David, an eyebrow raised in question as Mr. Nolan sunk against the fence post, waving it away. But never in his life had David Nolan felt more like accepting a cigarette from the troubled teenager across the street.

“You know, I’m feeling kind of hungry,” David mumbled, glancing sideways at the boy to gauge his reaction.

“Yeah?” Bae asked, tossing the cigarette down to the ground and putting out the little red glow with the toe of his boot. 

“Yeah,” David mumbled, looking out at the little house he and Mary Margaret had worked so hard to build over the years. Painted and maintained, lovingly cared for like a castle to house their princess, and now she was growing up and everything just felt a bit empty. “You want to grab a bite?”

“I got curfew after that shit with the rent-a-cop last week,” Bae mumbled. “Can’t go out past curfew.”

“Does your dad believe that lie?” David asks. “Go tell him Mr. Nolan is taking you out to eat. I’m sure he’ll be okay with it.”

And so they had ended up at Granny’s, watching Emma and Killian enjoy their first date, not really sure what they would do if something did go wrong. And they knew, they were both really torturing themselves, but they both kind of wanted the bittersweet pain of watching Emma smile and laugh with a man who wasn’t them. 

And of course, they make awkward small talk, because they can’t just stare creepily, intensely at Emma the whole time. They work out a sort of natural flow, Bae glancing over while David talks. David turning to look while Bae answers.

“So… the military… Does your dad like that plan?” David asks while Bae glares daggers at Killian.

“I haven’t told him yet,” Bae answers back while David turns to steal a look at his daughter.

“You ever thought about college?” David asks.

Bae bursts out laughing, so loudly that a couple tables turn to stare and they both have to hide their faces quickly to avoid being seen by Emma.

“Careful,” David scolds.

“Sorry, sir. No, I haven't thought about college. Don’t think I can afford it now that all that tooth fairy money has disappeared.”

“A bright boy like you, you could get a scholarship.”

“Scholarships are for geniuses,” Bae grumbles. “I’m smart, but I’m not scholarship smart.”

“Have you considered getting a tutor? I know a great woman, she volunteers at the animal shelter sometimes, but I think her day job is professional tutoring at the library. I could ask her if she’d be interested in taking on a new client.”

“Thank you, sir, but no thank you. We couldn’t afford it.”

“Let me just talk to your dad about it. I think he might prefer the idea of shelling out a small fee for Ms. French to the idea of his only child running off and getting himself killed overseas.”

And Bae didn’t have a response for that, so they both turned back to watching Emma enjoy her date with the boy who still called her Swan. But now it was like a term of endearment or something? Whatever.

Later that night, after Bae had climbed in through her window and the two of them sat playing cards on her bedroom floor in their pajamas, he found the courage to bring it up.

“So how did your date go, duckie? Oh, right, sorry, it’s Swan now.”

“Shut up,” she laughed, “Any twos?”

“Go fish.”

“You stink,” she said, sticking her tongue out as she drew a card. “And it was tons of fun. Now I see why you like dating Wendy so much.”

He and Wendy didn’t really go on dates. They were dating, but dates were expensive and both Bae and Wendy were a tad impulsive and impatient. But Emma didn’t need to know that. 

“Any Queens?” he asked as she shook her head and he picked up another card. “So are you and Killian official now? Is he your boyfriend? Are you going to kiss him?”

He stopped to make kissy faces at her over the cards in his hand, causing her to snort and giggle so loudly he was worried her parents might hear. He liked the way Emma snorted when she laughed, and that he could sit here and play Go Fish like a kid in his old Ninja Turtle pjs. There was no one passing around a bottle of stolen vodka or a joint, like at his friends’ houses. No Wendy to call him a loser for wearing the wrong band t-shirt, he could only imagine what she would say about the Ninja Turtles. And they never played games like Go Fish at his friends’ houses, instead opting for poker and spin the bottle and other games that Emma Nolan would have hated the thought of.

Bae liked having her, as his break from all that. She had always been his escape from whatever icky stuff was going on in his life at the time. 

“Stop it!” she squeals, punching him in the shoulder as he pretends to wince like it hurts. “It was just one date. Nothing serious. Just a first date.”

But it quickly turns into a second. And a third. And then a school dance.

And Bae tells himself he isn’t jealous, because he doesn’t like school dances, and he doesn’t like Emma like that. It’s just that he really hates Killian and he doesn’t want to see him happy for even one second. Is it shallow and petty? Sure. Is it probably some misplaced anger at his mom and dad? Definitely. But it’s the best way he knows how to cope with the tangle of feelings that are just too complicated, mixed with some seriously out of control hormones, and a whole host of family issues, without snapping and breaking a couple dozen car windows just for the hell of it. 

And eventually, David and Bae can’t tag along on those dates anymore, because they both know it’s time to let Emma sink or swim on her own, so by the time she and Killian are actually dating, Bae and Mr. Nolan are back to barely acknowledging each other when he comes over to see Emma or casually waving when they pass by each other on the sidewalk.

But sometimes, when he’s with Wendy and his friends - or worse, when he’s alone in his bed at night - he thinks about the way she looked on that first date, with her hair curled and that pretty pink dress clinging to her curves, and he kind of wishes he was her first date. He kind of wishes he was her first lots of things, and it makes him feel guilty and gross, but he isn’t strong enough to chase away those thoughts as his hand finds a rhythm, and so he wallows in the thoughts of her like the smell of her perfume. 


	10. Breakup

When Bae goes through his first breakup, Emma Nolan is the only one he wants to talk to. He calls her first thing on a Saturday morning, and she fumbles with her phone as she rubs sleep out of her eyes and answers the call. He tells her what happened and asks her to come over.

“Bae, I’m so sorry,” she says when she arrives at his house, wrapping him in a hug. He looks a little confused by the sentiment, but also a little tired - he looks a lot like his mother actually - as he pulls away from her hug.

“I’m fine,” he tells her, picking up some of his notebooks from tutoring so that there is room for her to sit on the couch. “I just, I didn’t want to be alone, is all.”

“Of course not,” she says, still searching him for any sign of distress, waiting for tears or anger, or something to boil over. She hasn’t been dating Killian for very long, but she knows if he dumped her she would be devastated. “Did she say why?”

“Huh?” he asks, looking up from the TV remote he was messing with.

“Did she say why she dumped you?”

“Oh,” he pauses, his mouth hanging open for a moment before turning back to the TV. “No, she didn’t really say anything about that. It’s not a big deal, though. We just stopped liking each other. It happens. I’m fine.”

“Do you want to go get ice cream?” Emma asks.

“Why would I want to go get ice cream?”

She shrugs. It’s what they always do in the romantic comedies that she watches with Ruby and Ashley. When a guy breaks your heart, you get ice cream. And Bae was trying really hard, but he definitely looked at least a little brokenhearted. Like, ten percent brokenhearted. Maybe twenty if she squinted. 

“Ice cream is the food of breakups,” she explains. “It’s just a thing girls do. Do you want some?”

And okay, yeah, he kind of did.

So they walk down to Any Given Sundae and order a banana split to share - Bae picks out the ice cream and Emma picks the toppings - finding a table at the back to dig in. And he’s chatting happily about school and his new tutor, who may or may not be sleeping with his dad, and asking her questions about Killian, and he doesn’t mention Wendy or the breakup at all. Which is really weird. He must be trying to hide his pain, the way she sees him act in front of Peter and Felix.

“Are you sure you’re fine?” she prods as he shoves another spoonful of chocolate ice cream in his mouth. “I’d be a mess right now if it were me.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Really, Em, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“How many times are you going to ask me that?”

“I mean it’s your first breakup…” She trails off, watching him lick the back of his spoon before returning it to the sundae, eating around the cherries because he knows those are her favorite part. 

“Yeah, which means I better get used to it. I’m gonna have a lot more.”

“Maybe not,” she offers. “Maybe your next girlfriend will be The One.”

He scoffs, “Em, I know you believe in all that crap - and it’s not your fault, your parents have been preaching it since you could walk - but I’m fifteen and I’m not really trying to get married any time soon. And anyway, just because I get married doesn’t mean that’s gonna last forever, either.”

She pouts as he goes back to filling his mouth with ice cream to stop the hateful words from spilling out. And yeah, Emma does believe in soulmates. She believes in happy endings. She believes that one day she’ll find the guy she is meant to be with, and they’ll get married, and have children, and basically be a whole new generation of Happy Nolans. 

And Bae does too, she knows it. So while they might disagree on some topics - like what counts as ‘sex’ and how much should be saved for that special someone - she knows that he must really be hurting to deny the existence of soulmates. He must really be in pain to put down the idea of marriage like that.

“I don’t think you’re fine,” she mumbles.

“You know what, Emma!” he snaps, slamming his spoon down on the table and looking over at her in frustration. “I’m not fine. Okay? I’m not fine, but it has nothing to do with Wendy. I’m not fine because I’m failing chemistry and no matter what I do I can’t get my grade up. I’m not fine because my dad has always been a little too busy to be a dad - which I don’t fault him for - but now suddenly he’s got tons of time to date my English tutor. I’m not fine because my best friend spends all her time with an intolerable douche, and if I want to see her I have to put up with him, too. I’m not fine because I’m a teenager, and so I’m either angry or horny all the goddamn time, and I feel like a complete idiot trying to control it most days. I’m not fine because I haven't seen my mom in over ten years and for all I know she could be dead, because we never hear from her. So, no, I’m not fine. Are you happy?”

“Do you feel better?” she asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, I do, actually. Wow. What was that?”

“It’s the ice cream,” she says sagely, grabbing another spoonful with a smile. 

He nods, thinking about it for a moment. “Are there any other girl-breakup tricks I should know about?”

And so Emma shows him all the tricks she knows. They go back to the Nolans’ house and she puts on at least four movies about love and relationships on the TV in her room. Mary Margaret makes popcorn while Emma shows Bae how to put on a face mask, and though he is tempted to pick at the edges as it dries, she assures him it will be worth it to wait. She braids his hair, which has really gotten too long, and tries to teach him to braid hers, though he is terrible at it. He relents and lets her paint his nails too, though he makes her take the polish back off as soon as she's done. And he’s smiling and happy, and Emma feels like she’s really made a difference.

And somewhere in between  _ Dirty Dancing _ and  _ The Princess Bride, _ Bae starts to cry and he just can’t stop. And so she wipes the face mask off with a wet washcloth, and tells him it’s all going to be okay, and he hugs her and rocks back and forth, and the words he manages to mumble do not make any sense.

“You don’t even know what I’m crying about,” he tells her as she continues to wipe at his face with the washcloth, though the mask is long gone and she is only wiping at tears now.

“I don’t need to,” she tells him.

And he falls asleep like that. And when he is asleep he looks like the toddler that used to run up to her gate to share new and exciting words with her. He looks like the little boy that used to push her on the swings and pretend she could fly. When he sleeps he doesn’t look like a teenager who smokes cigarettes and uses swear words and got hickeys from Wendy Darling under the bleachers. So she wraps her arms around him and pulls the blanket over the two of them, and drifts off right beside him.

Which, she learns, about an hour later, was a really bad idea. 

A truly terrible, absolutely awful, should not have even been considered, bad idea.

She learns this when her mother shouts her name and both she and Bae jolt awake, sitting upright and taking in her two very disapproving parents standing in the doorway.

“Out!” David yells, pointing down the stairs as Bae reaches for his boots sitting next to the bed on the floor.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not you,” David hisses, and for the first time ever Emma thinks her mom actually looks kind of scared, “Emma, you and your mom go downstairs. Bae and I need to have a talk.”

And Emma is barely out of her own room before the door slams in her face and she hears the beginnings of hushed, angry whispering as Mary Margaret takes her by the arm and drags her down into the kitchen. 

“Nothing happened!” she insists as her mother begins to nervously fold the laundry in the bin by the machine. “We just fell asleep.”

“I’m sure that’s true, honey,” Mary Margaret says. “We know you make such good decisions, but Bae doesn’t always make good decisions. He should have known better.”

That hardly seemed fair. He was the one going through a breakup, after all. It was understandable that his head might be a little cloudy right now. 

“He’s just upset that Wendy dumped him. I was just trying to make him feel better!”

“Are you sure about that?” her mom asked, picking up a towel and folding it over her knee, eyes too focused on the laundry to even glance at Emma. Which could only mean one thing: Mary Margaret was trying to keep a secret.

“Sure about what?”

“Nothing, sweetie, it’s nothing. I just think maybe Bae isn’t as upset as you think he is.”

“What does that mean?” she asked as she heard a door slam upstairs. Whatever Mr. Nolan and Bae had been talking about, the conversation was over now.

“Well,” her mother began, dragging the word out into three syllables. “We might have heard a different story. Apparently Mr. Darling caught Bae sneaking into Wendy’s room last night. Apparently he gave Bae an ultimatum - stop seeing his daughter or he would call the cops. Bae chose to stop seeing Wendy.”

That couldn’t be right. Well… Bae did sneak into her room an awful lot, but not like that. 

“That wasn’t very nice of Mr. Darling,” Emma says as she hears Bae stomp down the stairs, David Nolan following angrily behind him. 

“Emma, sweetie. He caught Bae in her bed. He wasn’t dressed appropriately for visiting a young lady, either.”

Emma looks over to her best friend, who apparently lives a whole secret life outside of what she knows, as he picks up his coat at the front door and sulks out onto the porch without even saying goodbye. David Nolan stands with his arms crossed in the front hallway, making sure Bae really does go home and not off to get into more trouble.

“Wait!” she yells, running after him, grabbing onto his shoulder and spinning him around to face her. He can’t look her in the eyes, his whole face warped into an angry sort of guilt. Like he was mad, but mostly just at himself. “Did you dump Wendy?”

“Why does it matter?” he moans, and she gets the feeling he’s very done talking about this with the Nolan family tonight. But that’s too bad, cause she has a lot more questions.

“Did you?” she presses.

“Yeah.” His tone is harsh, like an exhale with meaning.

“Why?”

“Her dad caught us.”

“So?”

“He said he was going to call the cops on me. That I was trespassing or some shit. Turns out I like not being arrested more than I liked Wendy.”

“Were you really…” she trails off, looking away because the thought is just upsetting to her. “Were you really in bed with her?”

“Yeah.” Another harsh exhale.

“Why didn’t you tell me? We tell each other everything! I told you about my first kiss! My first date! Why didn't you tell me about this?”

“Why do you think?” he hissed, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion. “I mean there's a big difference between sweet, little Emma Nolan telling me about how some guy looked at her for too long and it made her blush and me telling you about my first fuck, okay? Maybe I didn’t want you to look at me like you are right now! Maybe I didn’t want you to judge me!”

“I would never judge you!” she protests, and it’s mostly true. 

“Of course you would! Little Emma, waiting for marriage! Of course you would have judged me! Admit it, Emma, you think guys like me are scumbags and girls like Wendy are sluts, and sometimes I like to pretend that not everyone in this damn town thinks that way! Sometimes I like spending time with you, because you’re the last person in Storybrooke who doesn’t think I’m just a waste of their tax dollars. So I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to ruin that. It was selfish, but I’m not sorry.”

“How could you ever think I would think that about you?” she whispers, tears pouring down her own face now. 

He glares up over her shoulder, looking past her to the two shadows still looming in the doorway. “You don’t? Really? Cause your parents sure do.”

She watched him sulk away back to his house, disappearing inside the darkened doorway.

Emma Nolan had never once thought a bad thing about Baelfire Gold. She didn’t like all his choices, but she had never once thought less of him for them. She defended him no matter what was said, even when he was the one saying the negative things. She had always been there for him, and he had always been there for her, so it only made sense that they would go through this together. She knew that technically, Bae’s breakup was his own business, and not hers to bother with. But that was stupid and she had only wanted to help.

Bae had just gone through his first breakup, and as upset as he was right now, he would get over it. It was just his first breakup. So why did it feel like hers, too?


	11. I Love You

The first time Emma ever says ‘I love you’, Bae thanks his lucky stars he is there to hear those words.

They are laying in cheap folding lawn chairs out in front of his house, in their swimsuits and brightly colored plastic sunglasses they bought at the dollar store with a liter of soda this morning. Bae has rigged the hose to spray a fine mist over them as they soak up the summertime sun, only a few weeks away from starting their sophomore and junior years of high school. 

Bae’s bike sits glittering in the sun in front of them, parked along the curb in front of the Golds’ house, his most, and only, prized possession. 

Bae loves that motorcycle. He washes it at least once a week. He is always outside, fussing with it. When he isn’t riding it. She sees him around Storybrooke with different girls hanging off the back, Tinkerbelle, Tamara, Regina. It seems like all the bad girls in town love a boy with a bike. He also rides it out of town, down the winding highways and back country roads when he just needs to get away from his dad and new stepmom for a little bit. The older Bae gets, the more he understands his mother’s desperate push for freedom from this town and these people.

The Nolans, on the other hand, hate that bike. It’s loud, and it’s dangerous, and it’s kind of an eyesore. They hate the way Bae revs the engine at all hours of the day and night, partially because he knows it irks them. They hate the way it has become a sort of signal, Emma waiting patiently by the window to see the bike return. When it is parked out front of the Gold house - normally so is their daughter. And when it’s gone - normally so is their daughter. Which is the main reason they hate that bike.

“A motorcycle?” Mary Margaret had asked when he’d first shown up with it, beaming from ear to ear. “Is that really safe, Bae?”

He shrugs, “I mean, a car is a couple thousand. But a bike is a couple hundred.”

“We would have loaned you the money,” Mary Margaret pushes, but Bae just raises an eyebrow because they all know that had he come creeping around and asking to borrow a couple thousand dollars, no one would have said yes.

But he gets a pink helmet for Emma and she covers it in stickers. And he always makes her wear it. And so far, nothing bad has happened, so the Nolans can only object so much. 

But today it is too hot to ride. Today it is too hot to do much of anything but bask in the sun, feeling the light mist from the hose - reminiscent of the sprinklers they used to run in - raining down on their sun-baked skin as they wait for another year of high school to start. 

They hear the front door slam as Belle makes her way down the front step, purse in hand as she carefully sidesteps the two of them and their homemade mister. 

“Bye Belle, have a nice day,” he calls, peering at her over his sunglasses as she waves, getting into her car and driving off. She tutors college kids one town over during the summer, lucrative enough additional income that Mr. Gold can afford to close the shop a little early to be home with his family a little more these days. Which Emma thinks is nice, but Bae thinks is too little, too late.

“How is that going?” Emma asks as Belle’s car disappears down the street.

Weird is how it’s going. Belle is twenty-three, and oftentimes Bae forgets she’s not here for him anymore. In fact, when she and his dad had gotten married in a rush ceremony out on the edge of town a couple months ago, Bae had been sure she was pregnant. But months had passed and Belle’s curves remained as perfect as ever, so he guessed maybe this was something more than that.

“Pop is happier these days,” he conceded, pushing his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose and reaching for the bottle of soda sitting between their lawn chairs. He pops the top off and takes a heavy swig before offering it to her. “They seem to really love each other, so there’s that.”

She adjusts the straps of her bikini top - David Nolan had almost lost it when she came home from the mall with Bae, showing off her first ever bikini this summer - it’s white with little red cherries dotting the fabric. Emma loves it because it makes her look more tan, Bae loves it because it’s kind of small. 

“Killian told me he loves me the other day,” she says absentmindedly as she takes the bottle out of his hand and helps herself to the soda as well. It’s gone warm by now, but neither one wants to make the effort to get up and get a cup of ice.

“Oh, yeah?” Bae asks, “Did you say it back?”

“No,” she mumbles, sitting the bottle back down. “I told him I needed time to think about it.”

“Ouch. Poor guy.”

“What?” she says, a little exasperated. “‘I love you’ is a big deal and Killian and I can barely stay together for a couple of weeks, much less long enough to be making big declarations of love.”

It was true. Killian and Emma had developed this delightfully annoying habit of dating on-again-off-again that made it almost impossible to keep track of their major milestones. Bae didn’t mind, his time with Emma never seemed to change since he’d admitted to not liking Killian during his first breakup. The rest of town seemed to think it strange though, that Emma’s off-again stages always seemed to line up with the few stretches of time that Bae was also single.

“Normally,” Bae explains, “When one person says ‘I love you’ and the other can’t say it back - that means things are over.”

“I don’t want him to leave me,” she complains. 

“Then say it back.”

“But… it’s just such a big deal.”

“No it’s not,” he sighs. “I say it all the time. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just words.”

And he knows that much is true from his mother. Bae had learned a lot about dating from his mother and the short couple of years she had spent with him. He had learned that little white lies were there to protect other people. He had learned that words mattered more to some people then the intent behind them. He had learned that commitment and forever were dirty words that left you feeling caged and stifled and so were probably best not to think about. And yes, when he was with Emma he let himself dream right alongside her of that fairy tale true love that would come along and sweep him off his feet - but then he’d remember he was the one supposed to do the sweeping, and that really just sounded like a lot of work to him. So Bae said a lot of words he didn’t mean, but they always sounded nice. He’d always had a bit of a way with words.

“Yeah,” she concedes sadly, “But I want it to mean something. I want the first time I say those words to be important. I don’t want to just say them so Killian won’t leave me.”

“What you’re saying is you don’t mind lying to Killain, you just don’t want to lie your first time?” he laughs at her.

“Yeah,” she chuckles back, “I guess that is what I’m saying. It sounds stupid doesn’t it?”

“No, it just sounds like you.”

And he means that as a compliment. Because Emma isn’t like him or the other people he spends time with. Emma still holds on to hope and dreams and sincerity. Emma puts so much importance on little things - has so many hard and fast rules she follows when it comes to dating and her love life - that she is what some adults would call ‘respectable’. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she shoots back, reaching across the distance to smack his shoulder, which stings a little from the heat of the sun. 

“It means if it’s important to you, I say stick to it.”

“Sometimes I wish I could just get it out of the way.”

And so he knows what he has to do. Doesn’t even hesitate.

“Hey, Emma?” he says, lowering his sunglasses to look at her with a grin. “I love you.”

She grins, her cheeks rounded with mirth as she lowers her own sunglasses to look back. And there are a whole lot of emotions in those blue eyes that scare Bae. That make him want to get up, and start running, and never look back. But he doesn’t run, because Emma is the one thing in his life he has never run away from. 

“I love you too, Bae.”

They both go back to sitting in comfortable silence, soaking up the sun and each other's company.

She says those same words to Killian a week later, and Bae always wonders if she meant them. For his part, Bae continues to say them to any girl who will listen, and he knows without a doubt he doesn’t. Over the next handful of years they will both say a lot of things - to other people and each other - where sincerity and comfort are all mixed together, things like love and obligation tangling to form those traps Bae has always been so afraid of.

They’ll say loving things to others and hateful things to each other.

They’ll confess and confide deep secrets and then deny them all because they’re teenagers and that’s what they do.

But Bae will always know, the first time he and Emma Nolan ever said ‘I love you’, and meant it, was to each other.


	12. Home Alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't help myself, I'm sorry. Just know, it could have been waaaay worse - I cut out most of the dialogue where they discuss the show (And Emma's love of Rene).

Emma Nolan lies to her parents the first time Bae spends a night alone in his house.

He’s spent a lot of time alone in that house over the years, but as he starts his senior year of high school, and as Belle prepares for the delivery of her first child, the Golds start to lay down some ground rules for his first full night without an adult in the house.

Of course, Rumple is smart enough to know his son won’t follow any of those rules, but he sets them all the same because he’s trying really hard to be the dad Bae deserved about seventeen years ago. 

The first rule, the golden rule, is no girls in the house.

So of course the first thing Bae does is invite Emma Nolan over to spend the night with him. Because to Bae, Emma isn’t a girl. And to Emma, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s Bae and so nothing really matters.

She packs an overnight bag and tells her parents she is staying with Ashley, and then sneaks into the back kitchen door once Bae texts her to let her know that David’s truck isn’t in the driveway anymore. 

And when she gets into the house, she is surprised to find that Bae is making dinner. He has a cutting board of vegetables sitting washed and chopped for a salad on the counter next to him while he stirs something that looks kinda like a bowl of pasta sauce with a few noodles in it on the stove. 

“You cooking for me?” she laughs as she sits her bag down by the door, picking one of the carrot slices off the counter and popping it in her mouth with a grin. “How romantic!”

“You know me,” he laughs back, “Most romantic motherfucker on the block.”

“Language,” she chides as she grabs onto his shoulders, to pull herself taller and get a glimpse of the mess he’s making on the stove.

“Sorry,” he corrects himself, and he means it, because he does try hard not to swear around Emma, “Most romantic… I’m a hell of a catch, is what I’m trying to say. Nah, I just figured, first night on my own, I should try cooking something for myself. Never done it before, thought I probably should.”

She laughs, grabbing plates out of the cabinet and handing them to him, watching him put two spoonfuls of the pasta mess onto the plates and then scooping the heap of vegetables in a bowl with his hands - that Emma hopes, but doubts, he remembered to wash.

“Come on, Bae, you make dinner for yourself all the time.”

“Yeah, but beer and pop tarts aren't really cooking. Plus, you’re coming over, so I felt like I needed to feed you.”

“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” she smiles, as she pushes herself up on the counter and crosses her ankles even though she isn’t wearing a skirt. It's a force of habit at this point, manners drilled into her by Mary Margaret. “But I will take a beer.”

“Naughty, Naughty,” he chides, pulling one of the beers he is constantly stealing from his dad out of the fridge and popping the top off with his belt buckle before handing it to her. 

“Shut up,” she laughs as he retrieves one for himself and then they take their plates into the living room, to sink into the threadbare, but incredibly comfortable, couch that is older than Bae. “So how long has Belle been in labor?”

He shrugs, as he fusses with the remote, “Best guess is about three hours? I’m sure they’ll text when I’m a big brother.”

“You excited?”

“I guess,” he says with another shrug, picking out one of his shows to put on the TV. Bae watches a lot of shows the Nolans would not have approved of. When he is over at her house he never complains about the stuff they watch, he talks to her and laughs right along with the corny jokes, and sometimes she thinks he even gets a little invested in the cartoons and their lovable characters.

But the Golds don’t monitor their TV quite so closely. Emma watched her first R rated movie on their couch, associates the TV in their house with the titillating sort of gore and sex that her parents don’t allow on their screen. And sometimes she even kind of enjoys it. She knows Bae would put on her shows if she asked, but she doesn’t, because this is really her only chance to be exposed to things like this and it makes her feel like less of a little kid. 

“What’s this one?” she asks as the screen flares to life with the sound of a bass guitar and a couple shots of a swamp. The theme song sounds like the kind of music Bae listens to with his friends. 

“It’s called True Blood. It’s about vampires, want me to start it over?”

“No, it’s fine, you’re already halfway through the first season, just fill me in,” she says as she shovels some of the pasta, that isn’t half bad, into her mouth. 

And so he does, pausing the screen every time he needs to stop to explain, and sometimes Emma wishes he wouldn’t pause it cause sometimes there are scenes she doesn’t want on the screen for that much longer. He laughs at her, the first time she winces away from a sex scene, reaches up and covers her eyes the next time, and then finally settles on wrapping his arm around her shoulder as she buries her face in his shirt to hide from the gore and adamantly insists that, no, she does not want him to turn it off.

“You sure?” he asks again as she practically crawls into his lap the first time the gore and sex collide on screen, and she realizes, with much hesitation, that she does not. Because she kind of likes his arm around her to cover her face in a way that is protective but not quite fraternal. And she kind of likes her feet curled up in his lap where he is absentmindedly rubbing them with his free hand when it isn’t holding a beer. 

“No, it’s just gross is all,” she laughs a bit, trying to shake that uncomfortable feeling of closeness that hadn’t seemed all that weird yesterday. “I mean, I can’t believe people actually like this.”

“Like what?” he laughs, turning his eyes away from the TV without pausing, the noises of the sex scene carrying on behind them. 

“Like…” she trails off, gesturing to the screen. “It’s just weird is all. Vampires and blood and stuff.”

He grins, turning so that he is facing her now, that big, embarrassing smile on his face. And she knows he’s about to call her ‘cute’ or ‘sweet’ or any of those other words that really just mean naive. “You and Killian never got adventurous?”

She glares. Because she and Killian are back off again, and he knows better than to bring up her ex. And also because she continues to tell him everything about her love life, even if he insists on keeping his a secret, and so he knows full well that she and Killian did not carry on like the people on the screen.

“Never?” he says, sounding a little surprised. 

“No!” she says, full of exasperation. 

“It’s fun,” he laughs, “Like playing pretend for grownups.”

“I don’t see anything fun about the thought of a vampire biting me!”

He wiggles an eyebrow at her, and she knows that look, as he lunges across the couch and she scrambles to get away, his hands tickling at her ribs the way they always had when they were wrestling as kids.

“Get off me,” she laughs, kicking at him as she convulses with laughter.

“I vant to suck your blood,” he teases in an over-the-top fake accent, using his hips to pin her down as she continues to thrash about from the tickling, swatting at his hands to no avail. Just like when they were kids and they would play fight.

She wiggles underneath him, pulling her silver cross necklace out from underneath her blouse and holding it up against him with a sideways smile. “Get back, foul creature!”

And he pretends to wince away for a moment as she catches her breath, his tickling only returning in force once she’s calmed down a bit. 

“Your tricks don’t work on me, little girl,” he laughs, and suddenly he’s a lot closer than just sitting on top of her tickling her ribs. His breath is warm against her neck as his teeth lightly graze her skin and send shivers down her spine. In fact, one of his hands isn’t even on her ribs at all any more, it’s wrapped around her shoulder, pulling her toward him.

But it’s Bae. And she knows that he’s like this. So she laughs it off, turning her face away from him as she continues to squirm and tease. 

“No, I’m too pure for a demon like you. Get away!”

“Virgin blood tastes best,” he laughs, and this time there is pressure as his teeth sink into her neck. Not hard enough to leave a mark, he’s not an idiot, but it’s definitely more than just a game as his tongue traces over her throat.

And that’s when Emma feels something change between them.

Not emotionally. She supposes they’ve always been here emotionally, which is an unsettling thought, but one to worry about later. 

No, she actually  _ feels _ a change.

She pushes him off her, quickly, her eyes wide as he tries to figure out what’s wrong.

“Sorry, Em,” he hurries, “did I take that too far?”

Heck yeah, he did.

“No, I just think… Bae…”

And her eyes drift to his lap as he figures out what has upset her and tugs the hem of his shirt down a little uncomfortably.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he tries to assure her. But he’s lying and she knows it.

“I think I should go,” she says, standing up to get her bag from by the door.

“Please don’t go. Em, it’s just biology, I can’t help it! Don’t go!” he is yelling after her as she hurriedly apologizes and heads down the block to Ashley’s house. Because she can’t go home now or her parents will know she’s been lying. And they will certainly never let her see Bae again if they knew.

And that idea of not seeing Bae again… well, even as freaked out as she is at the sudden shift in the way he sees her - she sees him? - is one she isn’t even willing to entertain.

She wants to see Bae again, obviously. She wants to laugh while he tickles her the same way they always have. And maybe a little bit the way they just were, too. She’s not sure.

But she is sure of one thing: While Bae might be ready for his first night without adult supervision, Emma certainly wasn’t.


	13. Driving

The first time Emma ever gets behind the wheel of a car, Bae is there in the backseat cheering her on.

David Nolan, having a panic attack in the passenger seat, is not thrilled about the idea of endangering the neighbor boy’s life along with their own, but Bae asks for a ride to the library and Emma agrees before David can suggest that it might be better if he walked.

“You’re going to need to put on your turn signal,” he warns as his daughter grips the wheel so tightly her knuckles turn white. “Baby, put your- put your- oh my God!”

Bae laughs as Emma merges into the left lane, the car jerking so suddenly that David grips at the little handle above the door and Emma lets out a gasp of surprise as Bae is flung across the back seat - having forgotten to put his seat belt on.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice tight with panic as everyone recovers from the sudden surprise. 

“It’s fine,” Bae chuckles as he buckles himself in and David gives them both a pointed glare. 

It’s only a few more minutes before Emma almost kills them all again, slamming on her breaks as a light shifts from green to yellow and David begins to scream for her to slow down!

She looks mortified, but Bae who got his learner’s permit on a motorcycle and has never once had to have an adult in the car with him because he's a really good test taker and really great at forging his dad's signature, just thinks it’s incredibly funny. And a little cute.

There is probably something wrong with him that he finds the adrenaline of almost dying a little bit of a turn-on, but that’s for future Bae to worry about in therapy. 

And they are never going to get to the library at this rate. Because the more David fusses the more Emma worries. And the more she worried the more mistakes she made. And the more mistakes she made, the more David fussed. Maybe he should have taken his bike…

“Pull over,” he tells Emma after she runs another stop sign and almost collides with a turning car at the intersection. David alternates between scolding her and trying to catch his breath. 

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles.

“It’s alright,” Bae says as she drifts towards the curb, the terrible noise of tires scraping concrete causing them all to cringe as he hops out of the back seat and knocks on Mr. Nolan’s window. “Get out.”

“What?” David and Emma ask at the same time.

“Get out,” he repeats, gesturing for Mr. Nolan to get into the backseat, and he does, too startled and dazed by Emma’s driving to put up much of a protest.

Bae climbs into the passenger seat, buckling his seat belt as he pulls a cigarette out of the box in his breast pocket and lights it, dangling it out the window as he turns back to David. “You want one? You look like you could use it.”

David nods reluctantly, taking the little cardboard box from Bae and whispering, “Don’t tell Mary Margaret.”

“Okay,” Bae says, turning back to Emma, “Put your foot on the brake when you shift out of park.”

She nods, slamming her foot down so hard the car rocks before she’s even shifted gears, but she manages to pull away from the curb and back onto the road with little fuss. And occasionally he has to reach over and turn on her blinker for her, remind her to check her mirrors, scream for her to ‘fucking go!’ as she almost merges into another car on the highway, but for the most part he keeps his cool, smoke trailing out his window as his life flashes before his eyes at least three more times that day. And then when Emma has finally had her hour of driving practice, she drops him off outside the library, looking a little nervous again as David climbs back into the passenger seat and hands Bae a crumpled ten to replace the pack of cigarettes he had smoked to keep himself from having a stroke.

“Okay, honey,” Mr. Nolan says with a shaky breath - and Bae does not envy him the nicotine headache he'll be having tomorrow - as he looks back to his daughter in the driver seat. “Let’s head back, Bae can walk home when he’s done.”

“No! We have to wait for Bae!” she protests.

“No, it’s fine, I’ve just got some paperwork to fill out online, and pop couldn’t pay the internet bill again. You don’t need to wait,” Bae says quickly, looking away from the car and shoving his hands in his pockets, trying to look as casual as possible.

And he doesn’t want her to wait, either. He doesn’t want her to see what he’s doing in secret because he can’t tell his dad, or his stepmom, or any of his teachers about it. He doesn’t want to worry anyone when his chances are slim to none anyway. 

Because like most things that Bae doesn’t want to tell Emma about, he is here because of a woman. Two, actually, if you count Emma.

He’s here partly because things have been weird with Emma since that night. She doesn’t talk to him any differently, she doesn’t even notice it herself, but now it’s like she’s afraid to touch him. And that bothers Bae a lot because they’ve always been particularly physically affectionate. It also bothers him because it’s not his fault. Just because his reaction was more palpable than hers, he had not been the only one who was into it. Yet it feels like he’s the only one who has to take any blame.

But mostly he’s here because of the other woman. He’s here because while sulking over things with Emma, he had received some very good advice - good was a strong word - he had received some questionable but intriguing advice. He’s here because he can’t stop thinking about that woman, who arrived a couple weeks ago and changed everything.

So he waves from the front steps of the library as she and David Nolan drive off down the street, and then hurries inside to swipe his library card and go straight to the corner computer he’s been working at for the last couple weekends in private. 

After Emma gets the hang of driving the family car, she takes the driver’s exam and passes on the first try. Which is impressive, and Bae thinks it probably has more to do with her smile than her driving abilities, because she can’t parallel park for shit and had put more dents in the Nolans old green Toyota than Bae can help her fix before her parents find them. 

And to celebrate, the Nolan’s buy her a car.

It’s a beat up yellow bug, definitely used, and probably not that safe. But it’s the one Emma picks out, and she loves it so much. She buys bumper stickers for the back and a dream-catcher to hang from the rear view mirror and fawns over it for days before finally working up the courage to take it out for a drive without an adult.

And of course, Bae is invited along for that ride as well. 

He stands at the edge of the Nolans’ driveway as Mary Margaret and Emma fuss with the mirrors and the radio and everything else that needs to be checked before they’ll agree to let Emma drive away in the Bug.

“Don’t get any ideas,” David mumbles, crossing his arms as he refuses to look at Bae.

“Ideas about what, sir?” Bae asks, genuinely confused, until he remembers that Emma hasn’t told her parents that she is back with Killian again. Their last breakup had been ugly, and the Nolans still hadn’t forgiven the boy who had never really been welcome in Emma’s life. So she had told Bae and her girlfriends, but asked that no one let the Nolans know. 

“You know, Mary Margaret used to have a car like that one, when we were back in high school,” David mumbles, the only answer he offers Bae.

“Oh, yeah? Was that before or after you quit smoking?”

“You think you’re funny. I assure you, you’re not,” David said, sitting a heavy hand on Bae’s shoulder.

“I know, sir.”

“And it was before. For the record. I still had my long hair, like you, too. And so trust me when I say, I know what happens in the backseat of cars. And if I ever find out you have so much as laid a hand on my daughter, I will kill you.”

“Did Mrs. Nolan’s dad try to kill you, too?” Bae asks, pushing his luck as Emma and her mom finish inspecting the car.

“I behaved. Just like you will.”

Bae smiles, because he knows what David is trying to tell him.

“You have my word, sir, I will never have sex with Emma in that car.”

“Thank you, Bae.”

“Girls like Emma deserve a little more respect than a car. I’d probably spring for a hotel or something.”

David turned to glare at him, Bae’s incorrigible grin looking up at the man whose love/hate relationship was probably the most stable thing in his life. And though he hadn’t told Emma, or anyone else yet, he was going to miss that glare when he left town in a few months.

“Hey, wait… That’s not…” David stuttered as Bae climbed into the passenger seat next to Emma and gave a coy little wave as she drove him down the block.

They went in circles for hours singing along to the radio and enjoying the taste of freedom.

And while Emma enjoyed her first time driving without an adult, Bae tried to soak up every moment with her that he could. Because he knew, even if he wasn’t quite sure how to articulate it yet, that all their ‘firsts’ were about to come to an end when Emma finally found out what he’d done. 


	14. Acceptance Letter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I normally make Bae an artist - headcanon him studying Studio Art at FSU in most of my real world AUs - but when I got to this chapter I realized that in this story I've focused more on his way with words, his constant talking as a kid, and the stories he makes up for Emma. So I decided to make him a different kind of artist in this. Just thought I should explain the thought behind that decision.

Despite his best efforts to prevent it, Emma is there when Bae gets his first, and only, acceptance letter. 

They are sitting on the couch and watching cartoons with his baby brother, who is now old enough to sit up and grab for things, but not old enough to be much trouble. Occasionally Bae will reach over and pluck whatever household object Gideon is holding back out of the baby’s mouth, wiping it on his shirt and then putting it out of Gideon’s reach. Emma thinks it's a little gross, how much baby spit coats everything in the Golds’ house these days. 

“Neal, honey, you’ve got mail,” Belle says as she walks in, closing the door with the heel of her foot as she rifles through the envelopes in her hand.

“Just put it on my bed,” he says, his eyes still glued to the TV, “I’ll get to it later.”

“I think you might want to open this one now. It looks important,” she says, waving the paper in front of his face and causing him to swat it away in annoyance. Belle seems to want to be Bae’s friend, hadn’t quite picked up on the fact that he wasn’t looking for another friend. Or another mom. 

He was also just a lot grumpier lately since trying to quit smoking. But he was trying really hard, for his little brother and for Emma. He had started chewing toothpicks at her dad’s suggestion, always smelled like spearmint gum, and had a little square spot on his shoulder where his tan was lacking. But he didn’t reek of smoke anymore and had even started going for morning jogs, so overall Emma thought it was a positive. 

Emma takes the letter out of Belle’s hand with a nod, and they are both surprised as Bea lunges across the couch to snatch it away from her.

“What has gotten into you?” she laughs, leaning back and holding the letter higher in the air, pushing against his chest with her foot to keep it just out of his reach. 

“I said I want to read it later,” he hisses, still trying to get it away from her as Belle snatches it back and slides one long fingernail under the edge of the envelope.

“Dear Mr. Gold,” she reads as Bae scrambles over the back of the couch, trying to catch her as she dances around the coffee table, just out of his reach. “Congratulations on behalf of the faculty, students, and staff of Florida State University. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the class of-”

He grabs the letter away, shoving it in his back pocket. 

“Bae, what is that?” Emma asks, looking back and forth between him and his stepmom.

“It’s just a school I applied to, no big deal.”

“It is a big deal!” Belle cheers, “You got into college!”

“You got into college?” Emma asks, jumping up and kissing him on the cheek. “That’s amazing, Bae!”

“When did you even apply to college?” Belle asks. 

“A couple months ago. I didn’t want to get anyone's hopes up,” he mumbles, not nearly as excited as he should be. 

“We are going to have so much fun! You’re going to take me to college parties and we’ll hang out in your dorm! I can’t wait!” Emma yells, but Bae isn’t celebrating with her.

“Emma,” he whispers, “It’s in Tallahassee.”

“So? I’ve got a car?” she says, looking back and forth between him and Belle for the detail she is missing. 

“It’s a twenty-four hour drive,” he says and her whole face falls. A full day? So… did that mean for the first time in her life she wasn’t going to see him all the time?

“Well, maybe you’ll get into another one. A closer one.”

“Can we...?” he asks, nodding toward the stairs. Toward his room. Toward privacy. Whatever he has to tell her, he doesn’t want his stepmom to hear, and that is not a very good sign at all.

She follows him up to his room, sinking down onto his bed as he hovers over her, looking upset and in need of a cigarette. 

“I didn’t… I didn’t apply to any other schools,” he tells her. “It’s this one or nothing.”

“Well that’s stupid, why not?”

He sits down next to her, shoulders pressed against each other like they used to on their walks home from elementary school, folding his hands in his lap. “I need a fresh start, Emma. I’m never going to be anything here, just a delinquent and a mess. But in Tallahassee I’ve got room to start over. They’ve got a creative writing program - you know I’ve always had a way with words - and my SAT scores were good enough that they’re offering me a scholarship if I can get accepted. This is a really good thing. For me.”

She shakes her head. “You can’t go to Florida! I mean, how are you even going to pay for it?”

“The scholarship will cover most of it,” he says, looking away uncomfortably.

“And? What aren’t you telling me?”

“This will cover the rest,” he mumbles, reaching down under his bed and pulling out a crumpled piece of notebook paper, which he hands to her. 

It takes her a minute to figure out what’s going on, the letter is a little vague in details, but once she pieces it together she almost laughs. Almost. Because it would be cruel to laugh at him for that. 

_ Dear Bae, _

_ There isn’t anything I can say to fix everything. I’m fairly sure, if you’re anything like your parents, there isn’t anything you want to hear, either. So I’ll say what I need to for my sake and hope that it’s enough. I hope you’re happy in the life you’ve grown into. I hope you’re just as imaginative and smart as you always were. I hope you don’t miss me, because you’re too busy to miss me. And I hope you get out. I hope you leave Storybrooke behind and never look back. That town is a trap, Bae, and I want freedom for you. So here’s a little something, some seed money - or bail money - depending on which of your parents you ended up like, to get you started. _

_ Love, _

_ Mom. _

Stapled to the bottom was a check for twenty thousand dollars.

“It came in the mail a couple months ago. No return address,” he explains.

“I’m sorry Bae, but this isn’t real,” she says, setting it back in his lap. “You remember what your mom was like. There’s no way she has this kind of money. And there's no way she would share it.”

He doesn’t look at her for a moment, before whispering, “I’ve already cashed it. It is real.”

“So you’re really leaving?”

He nods.

“When?”

“Orientation is in August. So about four months.”

“Four months?!” she is outraged, bringing her fists down on his shoulders and he doesn't flinch away, just grabs her wrists and holds them tightly against his chest, his stormy grey eyes looking soft and sad. “When were you going to tell me?”

“I wanted to wait until I knew if it was going to happen or not. I wanted to wait until I got accepted.”

“And you got accepted.”

“I got accepted.”

It was the first time Bae had really been accepted to anything, and so she really wanted to be happy for him. It was the first time he’d ever had a plan for his future, ever had money in his account to support his plan, ever felt wanted at a place of high esteem.

And Emma really wanted to feel happy for him, but she just couldn’t.


	15. Job

When Emma gets her first job at Any Given Sundae, Bae is the first customer in line to order a scoop and put way too much money in the tip jar.

It’s their last summer together and Bae planned, from the moment that letter came in April, to make the most of it. They spent their remaining two months of school planning the ultimate Last Summer Bucket List of all the things they wanted to do before Bae moved away to college. They made playlists for road trips they were going to take to the beach, drew up fliers for a graduation party they were going to host, wrote letters to themselves to put in a time capsule to bury in Emma’s backyard. It was going to be an amazing summer because Emma didn’t believe him when he told her it was just for a few months and then he’d see her again at Christmas. 

And she is smart not to believe him, because Bae had already looked up the price of plane tickets, and he wasn’t sure he could swing it. 

So they put everything into their ideas for that last summer and tried their best to only cry in private, and not in front of each other, because this was a good thing. A good thing. A good thing. They just had to keep repeating it until it was true.

Which was why Emma lost it when her parents told her she would be working at her aunt’s ice cream store instead that summer. She had never been angrier, never yelled louder, never cared less about who was watching. It frightened Bae a little bit, as he sat at their dining room table, listening to Mary Margaret try to explain calmly to her daughter why she needed this job.

It would be good for her to have some responsibility before her senior year started.

She was going to need the income to pay for things like gas money and time out with her friends this year.

Ingrid really needed the help, and family was important.

Emma had stormed off to her room, slamming the door in her mother’s face, while Mary Margaret continued to beg and plead.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” Bae had quietly accused of David, who stayed behind in the kitchen with him to avoid his daughter’s ire.

“Yes, we are,” David shot back.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair in a couple months,” he says, picking up his backpack and heading to the door.

“That’s what we’re worried about Bae,” David shoots back just as icily. “ _ You _ don’t need any distractions this last summer.  _ You _ need to stay focused on what is right for your future. We’re worried Emma will only distract you from that.”

Bae hadn’t looked back as he slammed their front door, but he had cried a little in his room that night when he thought about it. Because despite everything, Mr. Nolan had always been the only one who gave a damn about his future. 

So they might have been able to keep them from all those unsupervised road trips, and parties, and other shenanigans the two of them had planned. But they couldn’t keep them apart.

Aunt Ingrid had been hesitant, almost hostile, toward Bae at first, his bike always parked outside of the little ice cream shop while he waited in the lobby for Emma to have a break. But Bae was charming when he wanted to be, and much to the Nolans’ dismay, he won Aunt Ingrid over rather quickly. He flirted mercilessly in that harmless way that older women always seemed to like, offering his assistance with carrying the heavy tubs of ice cream into the freezer and fixing the soft serve machine whenever it broke down. And so, even though it wasn’t the summer they had planned, they still got to spend it together, and that was what mattered.

“I got you a going away present,” he said one day, sitting on the counter next to the cash register while she refilled the bins behind the toppings bar. 

“That’s not how that works,” she laughed. “I’m supposed to get you something, you’re the one going away.”

He shrugs, “Guess I’ll return it then.”

She laughs, turning around to shove him off the counter. “Don’t you dare. I want it!”

“You don’t know what it is,” he smiled. “It could be awful.”

“Then you wouldn’t have called it a present,” she said, going back to her work with her back to him.

He had tried really hard to think of the right thing to get Emma and nothing said exactly what he wanted to. Hallmark didn’t really make a “I’ve loved you my whole life, and I know it feels like I’m abandoning you now, but eventually I will come back for you and it will be even better than it was before” card. Or if they did, he hadn’t been able to find one. He’d tried to make one but he always got stuck somewhere around the word ‘love’ and ended up tossing it out because he was worried that she would take that as a promise, and Bae didn’t want to make her any promises he wasn’t going to be able to keep.

So he’d asked his parents.

“Find something that has special meaning to the two of you,” Belle had told him at the same time his father answered, “Jewelry.”

So Bae had done both.

He pulls the silver necklace out of his pocket and dangles it in front of his smile as he says, “Turn around.”

And she grins and squeals as she plucks the necklace out of his hand, holding it up close to her face to inspect the little silver pendant hanging off the end. It wasn’t real silver. Bae couldn’t afford real silver, but it was shiny and simple, and he’d made sure that the chain was a little longer than her silver cross so she could wear both at the same time. 

“Is that a swan?” she chuckles as she runs her fingers over the engraved pendant, “Like what Killian calls me?”

“Or a duck if you squint,” he tells her, and then his smile softens to something sadder.

But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The beautiful swan that Killian sees and the fuzzy duckling that Bae has always held onto were the same thing. Emma was both. She was smiles and laughter; curves and grace. She was running through the sprinkler in summertime and seductive glances across the room. The duckling was always beautiful, and the swan was always lovable. And he hopes she can see that’s what he’s trying to tell her, because he doesn't know how to put it into words.

“Thank you, Bae.”

“I got you something else too,” he says, pulling his final gift out of his pocket and watching tears well up in her eyes. A purple crayon. “For your first day of school next year. Since I won’t be here to give it to you then. Know that I’m just one phone call away, Duckie, and I’ll still kick some ass if anyone is giving you any problems.”

And now she’s crying too hard to say anything, so he climbs over the counter and wraps her in a tight hug.

“It’s not forever,” he reminds her. “Just until Christmas.”

She nods, wiping her eyes on his shirt and getting herself together as the bell chimes and a customer enters the shop. So Bae ducks into the back room, because he’s not supposed to be behind the counter, that was made very clear to him, and he listens to Emma take orders from the group of teens actually getting to enjoy their summer.

Later, as he walks her home, both of them licking at their free scoops of ice cream Ingrid had let them take, he pauses to ask her a question he knows he’s going to regret.

“Hey, so my friends are throwing me a goodbye party at The Rabbit Hole next weekend. I know you don’t really like Peter and Felix, but maybe you could come?”

She laughs dryly and without mirth.

“Are you kidding? I guarantee you, no matter what night they pick, Ingrid will make sure I’m scheduled to work. The Rabbit Hole? My mom says you get hepatitis just from walking into that place.”

“Well the invite is there if you want it.”

She nods. “We should have a going away party, just our families. Get you a cake. And a going away gift as good as mine.”

“I’d rather not. Seriously, Em, I don’t want a single cent of your first paycheck going towards me. I’m fine. Don’t you dare mention it to our moms, either, cause I don’t want whatever mess Mrs. Nolan and Belle will throw together.”

“Of course not,” she says, leaning in. And she smells like chocolate and sugar, her lips sticky with ice cream as she presses a kiss to the corner of his smile.

She’ll have many more jobs over the years, some that she hates even more, and others that make her eyes sparkle when she talks about them. Bae will too. He’ll work jobs where he smells like motor oil and he burns his hands on hot car engines if he’s not careful. And he’ll work other jobs where it doesn’t feel much like working as he sits and types his stories, anxiously wondering if this one will be good enough to publish.

But he’ll always remember the way she smelled like chocolate and the taste of ice cream on her lips, from that very first job on their very last summer.


	16. Arrest

The first time Bae gets arrested, he uses his one phone call to call Emma Nolan. 

She is closing her aunt’s ice cream shop when the phone rings, and it’s after business hours so she should probably just let whoever it is leave a message. But on a whim she picks up and hears a sigh of relief on the other end.

“Oh, thank God, Emma,” Bae whispers into the phone and she thinks she can hear him breathing heavily into the mouthpiece. “Listen, I did something stupid. And I need you to come pick me up.”

When she walks into the station she is not prepared for the mess waiting for her.

“I’m here to pick up Balefire Gold?” she tells the lady at the front desk, digging in her purse for ID and the handful of cash she ‘borrowed’ from Ingrid’s cash register. It’s reckless, but she’ll get it back because that’s how bail works, right?

The lady smiles sweetly, waving it away as she hands Emma a plastic bag with Bae’s wallet, cellphone, and bike keys in it. “He’s out on his own reconnaissance, sweetie, he just needs a ride.”

Emma nods as they lead her into the back and she takes in the godawful sight of the drunk tank. Felix and Peter are there, bloody knuckles and messy hair, torn shirts and one of them is missing a shoe. Neither one looks sober, or conscious for that matter, and in that moment she hates them more than she has ever hated anyone else. Because since he was just a kid, they had been pulling Bae right along with them down this path, and maybe, just maybe, if he’d had better influences she wouldn’t be here now.

“Swan!” she hears Killian cry as he jumps up, grabbing onto the bars. His hair is a mess, his eyeliner smudged with the blood from his nose, distorting his face into something grotesque. “Thank God, you weren’t picking up your cell phone! Love, let’s go.”

“I’m not here for you,” she growls.

“Really?” he asks, dismayed. “After all we’ve been through, Emma, really? You’re here for him?”

And they both turn to look at the fourth member of the drunk tank, slumped over on one of the benches in the back, too ashamed to look at her, and definitely smart enough not to get close to Killian who is crowding the tank’s only door.

He's a mess, black eye and a bloody lip, tangled hair even worse tonight. And he’s missing his shirt. Emma wonders where the heck he managed to lose his shirt, but she’s also distracted by the large patch of gauze taped over his left pectoral and the fact that his hands have blood spatters on them. She knows whose it is without having to ask.

“Come on, tough guy,” she calls, motioning for Bae to get up and leave. “Let’s get you home.”

“Emma, if you leave here with him tonight, we are through,” Killian warns through the bars, his knuckles going white as he wraps his hands around the cold metal and glares at her.

“Sounds good,” she mumbles as they unlock the door and she puts a hand on Bae’s shoulder - hot and sweaty despite the AC pumping through the jail - leading him out to her car.

They’re quiet as she takes him back to his dad’s house and she parks her car on the darkened street, glad that her parents aren’t home to see this most recent display of Bae’s poor judgment.

“Where’s your shirt?” she finally asks as he continues to sit and stare out the window, making no effort to get out of the car. 

“I don’t know.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you still drunk?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you talk to me?”

He buries his head in his hands, pulling at the roots of his hair in frustration as he breathes heavily, trying to hold back something. What? She isn’t sure.

“I’ve fucked up my whole life, Emma. One night, and I’ve thrown away years worth of work. They’re gonna take my scholarship.”

“No, they’re not,” she assures him. “It’s not a big deal. You wouldn’t be out right now if it was a big deal.”

He scoffs and she realizes how little she actually knows about all this stuff. But he’s a kid right? Just graduated high school? There’s no way one little fight with Killian Jones - when the two had been fighting like this since second grade - would be that big of a deal.

“I’m eighteen,” he tells her. “They’re going to try me as an adult. I’m facing serious charges, Emma: Assault, Battery, Disorderly Conduct, Possession. They’re going to throw the book at me. And who cares if I lose the scholarship? Because I’ll be going to jail instead of college anyway!”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers cause it’s all she can say. And because she has the sneaking suspicion it’s because of her that all this started. “If there’s anything I can do-”

“No,” he sighs, finally reaching for the car door, “There’s nothing you can do. I mean, you’ve already done it. Thanks for the ride home.”

“Bae,” she says, catching his hand as he gets out of the car, “What’s that?”

He looks down at the gauze, his face lighting up in horror as if he is just realizing it’s there, peeling at the edges of the tape, he looks down and winces, putting it back before Emma can get a glimpse. “Fuck. I was hoping I’d imagined that…”

She raises an eyebrow.

“I might have gotten a tattoo.”

“Might?” she laughs, climbing out of the car and following him up the front steps, reaching for the gauze as he shoves her away, trying to find his keys in his pocket while still keeping his back to her and her groping hands. “Let me see!”

“No!” he shouts, but it’s not hateful, just embarrassed.

“It’s something really stupid, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” he admits, turning to face her, peeling off the edges of the tape to reveal the red and bloody skin underneath.

“Oh, Bae, that is stupid,” she whispers, taking a step back and grabbing at the railing of his front porch so that she doesn’t fall back down the steps. “Why?”

He looks down, all the laughter from his face completely gone as he swallows and brings a hand up to lightly trace the sore skin. “I have no clue. I remember Felix saying he brought his tattoo gun and literally nothing after that.”

“You know you can’t let my dad see that, right?” she whispers, reaching out to trace the letters of her name, a surprisingly elegant cursive for Felix’s homemade tattoos. 

“I guess that’s one good thing about jail, at least your dad won’t be able to get to me,” he chuckles. “I’m sorry, Em. For tonight. For everything. I feel like I’ve been nothing but a storm cloud on your perfect childhood and you don’t deserve half the shit you’ve been exposed to because of me. So if things do go south at my court date next week, just know I’m sorry. And that you’ve been the best part about these last eighteen years for me.”

“I think-”

He holds up his hand.

“I need to worry about my scholarship first. Then we can have this talk, okay?”

“Why wait?” she asks, her voice cracking as her eyes drift down to the ink on his chest. Because really, there is no need for this talk. They’ve been in love with each other since second grade, probably longer, and they don’t need to talk about it to know it’s true. To know she chose him over Killian tonight. To know that it’s her name permanently etched above his heart. 

“Because if I lose my scholarship - Then my future is going to look a hell of a lot different. Because I want to know what we’re getting into before we jump into anything. Because there’s a big difference between dating openly and conjugal visits. And I don’t want to let you down anymore than I already have.”

She nods and waits for the words she knows are coming. The real reason. Because she doesn’t remember Milah Gold very much, but she knows without a doubt that Bae is her son. So when it takes him too long to get around to that sentiment, she says it for him.

“And because if you don’t lose your scholarship, then you’re still leaving.”

“Yeah.”

So Bae spends the next week getting ready for sentencing with his court-appointed lawyer. And they all brace for the worst. But at the end of the day Mr. Nolan and Mr. Gold make a few calls and manage to convince someone somewhere that Bae is a good kid who, more than anything, needs to get out of this town if he’s ever going to have a shot at being something. And also, they convince Bae’s lawyer to raise charges against Killian as well - and so eventually the Joneses agree to drop their charges if Bae drops his - and so the only thing the court convicts him of is Possession. Which means Bae gets a misdemeanor on his record, and the choice between sixty days of jail time or six months of probation. Bae takes probation - which means he gets a probation officer, regular drug tests, and a lot of community service hours.

But he doesn’t lose his scholarship.

He spends weeks on the phone arguing with the Dean and Financial Aid, and anyone who will take his calls by the end of it, but he somehow manages to convince them that he deserves to keep his scholarship on the condition that he completes his probation and pushes back his start date to the Spring Semester. 

So when Emma tries to bring it up, that conversation that they’ve been postponing, he changes the subject quickly. The moment has passed, and all this mess has only delayed the inevitable. Now she has six more months to wallow in the idea that he is going to leave. And worse, now, because he is a semester behind, he is going to have to take summer classes to catch back up. Which means when he does leave, she won’t see him again until the following Christmas. A whole year without Bae.

“Thank you, Mr. Nolan,” he says one night over dinner as he is helping Emma set the table. “I really appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

And her dad just nods as Mary Margaret beams and Emma realizes that neither one has ever looked at Killian with that much affection. In fact, she realizes that besides herself and each other, she has never seen them look at anyone with that much adoration in their eyes. 

“It’s alright, Bae,” Mr. Nolan mumbles, “Just promise me: your first arrest is going to be your last.”

“Yes, sir,” Bae responds, and until the day he dies, he keeps that promise. 


	17. First Time

Bae is there for Emma’s  _ first time _ , and, oh, dear God, he should not have been.

And it’s not like her first kiss, or her first date, where he is a voyeur - an outsider looking on at the perfect intimacy of her life. He wishes it was like that, though.

He stares wide-eyed at the ceiling, panic coursing through every vein in his body as he wonders what the hell he was thinking. What the hell had he done?

That was a line that never should have been crossed.

Twice.

Her bed is soft, her pink sheets tangled around them, and he fights back two incredibly opposing and equally terrible ideas. He wants to fall asleep next to her and say ‘to hell with getting caught’, because if David Nolan is going to kill him, he might as well end on a high note. He also wants to get dressed, sneak out the door, and never look back, because he’s successfully ruined the last good thing in his life by being a reckless dipshit, just like always.

Her blonde curls wrap around his bicep as she snuggles closer to him in her sleep and he flexes his fingers to keep his arm from going completely numb. They’ve been laying like this for a while, and while she has drifted off peacefully, Bae’s not going to be able to sleep for a very long time.

In his defense he hadn’t planned any of this. He had come over to pick up some of the old baby furniture the Nolans still had in their garage for his stepmom. His stepmom, who was probably wondering where he was right now, because that was four hours ago. 

He had teased her. She had teased back. Everything had been just the way it always was between them. Until suddenly it wasn’t anymore and now he couldn’t remember who had started it, but it had spiraled out of control quickly enough, and now there was no going back and pretending it didn’t happen.

He could explain it: he was emotional about leaving; she had settled back into being physically affectionate with him; he was going to miss her more than words could describe; she had pulled him close, a game of intimate chicken, and neither one had blinked. 

Sure, he could explain it. But that didn’t mean he could excuse it.

Her first time. First! He was an ass. He didn’t even know what number it was for him. He’d lost count. Like an ass.

And what’s worse, he knew Emma had always been waiting for something serious. For a husband and a wedding. Looks like he'd torn that plan to shreds.

And now he’s here next to his best friend of eighteen years, and she’s so amazingly beautiful that he thinks maybe she is worth giving up everything for. But he remembers his mom, and how she had practically gone rabid after only a few years of marriage - felt trapped like an animal in a cage by the idea of settling in this little town and living with the bad decisions she’d made. And he knows, as much as he loves Emma - because he does love her, that was never a question - he knows he will feel the same way.

In this town, he has a criminal record and a whole slew of neighbors who have been rooting against him from day one. In this town he’s gotten himself into almost every bit of trouble available to him, but if he were to stay he is sure he would find some more.

“Emma,” he says, gently shaking her shoulder until she yawns, stretching her arms up above her head and he watches enthralled as her necklace disappears between her breasts as they rise up with the arch of her back. And maybe he could change, if he had Emma to help him… No, he’d always had Emma to help him and he was still a loser. His only way to change that was Tallahassee - college - starting over. “Emma, I need to go.”

She nods as he gathers his clothes from the floor, her fingers trailing down his spine before he lets his shirt fall over his shoulders and stands to struggle back into his jeans. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asks, because they had plans to go to the mall and pick out Christmas gifts for their families. “Or we could cancel the shopping… come hang out here instead?”

“We probably shouldn’t do this again,” he mumbles, pulling his boots on over bare feet because he can’t find his socks, his hands shaking too badly to bother with the laces. 

“Why not?” she laughs, sitting up and reaching for her own t-shirt. And he wants to tell her that he can still see her through the shirt, but that feels a little counterproductive to the point he is trying to make. “I mean, I’m no expert, but I think that was pretty good.”

Dear, God, yes it had been. The best Bae had ever experienced. Better than cigarettes and vodka and the satisfying pain of split knuckles. 

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea. You and me. Us. I’m still leaving for college, this doesn’t change that.”

“I never thought it would,” she says, reaching out from her bed and grabbing his hand as he tries to make his exit. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it while it lasts. This might sound crazy, but I think they still have phones and planes and all that jazz in Tallahassee. You're moving, Bae, not dying.”

And so he kneels down in front of the bed, taking her face in his hands as he looks into her eyes and tries not to picture the way she closes them tightly when she’s about to- nope, those thoughts are, again, rather counterproductive to the point he is trying to make. 

“We shouldn’t have done that. This isn’t you.”

She shrugs, “Maybe I’m growing up.”

He shakes his head, “It’s not about growing up, Emma. It’s about who we are as people. You’re the girl who has been saving herself for marriage and I’m the guy who was getting head behind the bleachers in seventh grade. I’m sorry, I know this means a lot to you, but I can’t marry you.”

She laughs, still not understanding how serious he is about this. “I wasn’t asking you to propose, Bae-”

“I can’t be Prince Charming!” he shouts, taking a second to calm himself as he lets go of her face to hold her hands which are folded primly in her lap. “I can’t give you the house with the white picket fence and the perfect marriage like your parents. You’re a princess who has dreamed of her wedding day - been saving herself for her wedding day - since we were little. And I’m, at best, a small temptation sent to ruin that. I can’t be the guy you want me to be, and I’m only going to resent you if I try - like my mother did. So that was fun, and I will never, as long as I live, have a memory that I cherish more than that, but we can’t do it again.”

She pouts, her brow furrowed and her lips pressed together, and he can’t tell if she’s confused about what he just said or angry at him for it.

“You could, you know. If you let go of everything that’s happened. You can start over anywhere, Bae. You could start over here, today, but you won’t let yourself. You’re just like your mom, and you think you have to run halfway around the world to find what’s missing, but what’s missing is inside you, and you can find it anywhere if you let yourself. Life can be a fairy tale if you choose to make it one.”

And that makes him mad, because he’s allowed to bring up his mom, but she isn’t.

“What am I missing, Emma? Love?”

She nods, letting go of his hands as she runs her fingers through his hair and presses her lips against his forehead.

“I love you, Emma. But I can’t love you the way you want me to.”

And he’s almost to the door when he hears her whisper, “I think you already do. And you're just too much of a coward to admit it.”

He turns back around, and she’s standing there, struggling into her jeans as she glares at him. Because she’s been her parents’ perfect princess, sure, but she’s also been the girl that has stood by him through thick and thin, seen every dark and terrible thing his world had to offer without flinching, so she is by no means going to let him stomp on her heart without taking a shot back.

“I think you love me, but you’re scared because you’ve never seen that work out before. So go ahead, push away the last person who still believes in you, Bae. Push away the only one in this town who sees more than just a delinquent and a problem when they look at you. Because your mommy fucked you up so badly that you can’t even begin to let yourself be happy for a second, because you’re afraid to lose it. Run away to college and pretend like you don’t also dream about a white picket fence and a happy marriage. I’m not asking you to be my Prince Charming, Bae, but don’t for one second delude yourself into thinking you couldn’t be, if you wanted to.”

He shakes his head, anger boiling at her words and says the only thing he can think of to hurt her as much as she’s hurt him.

“Go back to Killian, Emma. He’s got time for your fairy tale bullshit, but I don’t.”

And she doesn't run after him when he stomps down the stairs, because Emma Nolan is not the kind of girl who chases after someone who isn’t worth her time. And that’s how he knows she’ll never end up with a runner like him. 

But she’s right, and he hates that, because the real reason he couldn’t stay was simple.

He didn’t give a shit that he was her first.

He wanted to be her last, and the thought of committing to that idea - of getting his hopes up and then losing it - would kill him. So it was easier to be her first. He’d been that before. But he was scared of the word last. Like an ending. And he wanted it, but the world had shown him that he wasn’t the kind of guy who was allowed to have nice things like that.


	18. Apartment

Despite still being incredibly mad at him, Emma helps Bae move into his first apartment.

They haven't spoken much since their fight, both of them keeping their distance out of stubborn pride, but after Christmas it’s finally time for Bae to head off to school, and despite not having much, he has more than he can fit on his motorcycle.

So after weeks of awkwardly avoiding her, he finally comes crawling back to the Nolan house with an apology and a plea for one last bit of assistance before he’s not her problem anymore. He tells her that his dad can’t afford to close the shop, that Belle doesn’t want to leave Gideon for a week, and that if she can do this for him he will never ask anything else of her again.

And Emma agrees to load his few boxes into the back of her car and drive him twenty-four hours down to Tallahassee with very few objections, even though her parents are very adamantly against the idea. But in a weird way, she feels like she owes him, because now she’s ready to admit that going off to college is a good thing for Bae and as much as he’d hate her if he knew the truth, she isn’t going to mess that up for him. So she kind of owes him. 

They make a road trip out of it, like the ones they planned for that last summer, but with a lot less love between them on this go around. At least on her part. Bae still burns a lot of CDs for the car ride, packs snacks and makes plans of things to do when they stop, chats anxiously because he always was a nervous talker. 

He also agrees to pay for gas - there and back, because she’s going to have to return alone - and he insists he’ll pay for the hotel when they stop in Richmond on the way down. And he’ll buy her meals as well. And honestly, if she had any other conditions, he’d make sure those were met, too. But she doesn’t, she tells him it’s fine, and that is that. She just wants to get him off to school and out of the life he doesn’t deserve before it’s too late. The sooner the better. It hurts for her to end things with this terribly awkward distance between them, but it’s necessary and so she just listens to him ramble and drives in silence, occasionally mumbling along with the songs she knows he’s put on these CDs just for her. 

When they stop in Richmond for the night - a little more than halfway there - the guy at the front desk asks if he’d like a room with one bed or two.

“Two,” Emma insists, glaring straight ahead.

“Come on, Em, one is cheaper. It’s not like we haven't been napping together our whole lives,” Bae complains, counting the cash left in his wallet.

“He’ll take two,” Emma insists and Bae reluctantly forks over the cash.

They go out for dinner and take a tour of a historical cemetery and pretend they're just on vacation. For his part Bae continues to ramble as if there isn’t something incredibly uncomfortable between them. Emma eats in silence and answers his conversations in short clipped terms, trying hard not to let the words she really wants to say spill out of her mouth.

_ Don’t go. I love you. I need you. Stay with me. I’m scared and I can’t do this without you. _

As they lay in their separate beds later that night she knows he isn’t asleep because he isn’t snoring. 

“Are you nervous?” she asks into the darkness, looking up at the popcorn ceilings and imaging stars. 

“A little,” he answers back, his voice husky and quiet, so she knows it’s an understatement.

“But excited too, right?”

“Yeah.”

And that’s sort of how she is feeling right now, so she lets her voice fall quiet as they continue to lay in the dark together, neither one able to get much rest. She just needs to get him to Tallahassee where he is safely away from Storybrooke - and her father - and then she can worry about everything else. 

When they pull up to the apartment complex, Bae sits stunned in his seat, unable to move from the passenger side of the car. So Emma gets out and picks up the keys from the front office, unlocking the door and beckoning for him to join her.

He’s paid extra for the furniture, so it’s not completely empty as they walk inside and look around the little apartment. It’s actually kind of nice, and Emma resolves to send him a care package with a few posters and some knickknacks like candles and fake flowers, because honestly with just a few little touches like that it will be a really nice place for Bae. Better than his room back home, that’s for sure.

“I like it,” she says as they finish exploring the little bedroom, walk-in closet, and bathroom all off the living room and kitchen. “You’re going to do so much studying here. Like a real nerd. Promise you’ll send me an autographed copy of your first book?”

“I mean, I’m probably going to go into copywriting or something,” he mumbles, but catching the first loving look she’s given him this whole trip he grins and relents, “Sure, Em, I’ll send you the very first one.”

So she carries in the few boxes he has while he unscrews the hitch from the back of her car and gets his bike set up in his parking spot. And then she watches him unpack, folding clothes into the dresser and spreading sheets over the bare mattress, tucking the groceries they bought on the way down away into the cabinets. And he’s actually smiling by the end of everything because this is his place, and he feels like a weight has been lifted now that he’s out of that little town that never did anything but hate him. 

And she sees his mother in his smile, and wonders if this freedom had been enough for Milah. If it would be enough for Bae. If she would ever find out, or if, like Milah, he would forget to call once his new life started. 

She sets up her blanket and pillow on the couch in the living room, smiling awkwardly as he joins her, no longer the two of them sitting practically on top of each other, an uncomfortable distance filling the middle of the couch with silence and they both look at each other and then eyes dart away quickly again. 

“You want to get a pizza and a beer?” he asks, finally reaching out with his foot and kicking softly at her ankle to get her to look up at him. “I mean, I feel like we should celebrate.”

“I mean, I could go for some pizza,” she admits, “Not beer though.”

“You’re right,” he nods, “This is a special occasion, I should get a bottle of champagne. Christen the place in style.”

She shakes her head, “I’ve got a long drive tomorrow, I’m not going to drink.”

“Please,” he whispers, sounding sad again. “Celebrate with me. Because if I’m not celebrating, I’m going to cry. If you don’t want to drink to this new place, then let’s drink to the end of an era. Let’s get silly and stupid and pretend that we’re not both really sad about how things ended.”

“We can celebrate. But I’m not drinking.”

“Why!?”

And she really hadn’t been planning on telling him. He didn’t need to know. It would only complicate his decision, only make tonight harder, and she really wants to leave him here tomorrow free of obligation. But he’s like a dog with a bone and she sees that he won’t let it go.

“Because I’m pregnant!” she snaps.

He swallows hard, bringing his hands up to cover his open mouth, his chest rising and falling heavily and quickly. 

“Are you back with Killian?” he whispers hopefully.

“No.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

They sit there, her watching him for a change in reaction, him frozen as still as a statue.

“Say something,” she prompts

“Your dad is going to kill me.”

“That’s what you’re thinking right now?!” she demands, standing up and throwing her arms in the air in frustration. 

“What do you want me to say, Emma?” he yells back, standing just as quickly.

And that’s a really good question. What did she want him to say?

Maybe she wanted him to be excited. Or at least worried about her. Maybe she wanted him to ask how she was feeling. Maybe she wanted him to tell her how they were going to handle this, because she had no clue, but she was going to graduate in June and be a mom two months later, and that felt extremely unreal. Maybe she wanted him to change his mind about Tallahassee. Maybe she wanted him to stay in Tallahassee but change his mind about her, because this apartment was nice and as much as she loved Storybrooke, she didn’t love the idea of being a single teenage mother there.

“I don’t know,” she says instead, wiping at her eyes and hurtling off into the little bathroom to slam the door and cry by herself.

And he sits there, on the other side of the door. He doesn’t try to open it, he doesn’t even jiggle the handle, but she can hear it rattle as his weight settles against it, can hear him breathing only a few feet away.

And eventually he begins to talk, because talking is what Bae does when he’s nervous. And he’s always had a way with words - is probably going to be a great writer, she thinks - and so he finds all the things to say to make her feel better. And it all sounds really nice, but none of it is true, and anyway, she only has one thing on her mind now.

Because Bae was right the first time.

Her father is going to kill them both.

So eventually she stops crying and works up the courage to come out of the bathroom, almost trips over him as he scrambles to his feet, trying to hug her as she pushes past him.

“Em, where are you going?”

“I’m going to get an early start on my drive,” she tells him, swallowing back the lump in her throat. 

“Don’t do that,” he begs, “Stay with me.”

“I’m not ready to talk about this.”

“Then stay with me because it’s my first night in this apartment and I don’t want to spend it alone.”

“I don’t want to sleep on the couch, Bae,” she whispers.

“I don’t want you to, either.”

And she’s already pregnant, the damage is done, so what the heck, why not?

So Emma spends his first night in his first apartment with him. It is the last time she ever sets foot in that apartment, and even though she has no way of knowing that then, she strongly suspects it. Bae stays in that apartment for at least seven more years, and he has many other firsts there - alone. The first time he fails a class. The first time he pays taxes. The first time his motorcycle breaks and he can’t afford to fix it. The first time he gets a phone call in the middle of the night that a parent he hasn’t seen in over two decades has died. 

And he’s crying as he waves at her car pulling out of the parking lot the next morning, watching her disappear down the street and drive back to the life that wasn’t good enough for him anymore. But she tries not to look back, because firsts are beautiful memories, but it’s time that Emma Nolan acknowledge that life can’t be made up of firsts or you’d never have anything that lasted.


	19. Sonogram

Bae makes sure he is there for Emma Nolan’s first sonogram.

It is incredibly inconvenient for him, it’s right after his second week of classes and his third day of work at the garage down the street from his apartment, but he manages to get permission to submit his first essay online and begs his boss for the weekend home so he can fly back to see his kid for the first time.

And it’s weird, and he tries to be mature about it, but he sits in the doctor’s office holding Emma’s hand and is overwhelmed by the sight of his baby and the sound of its heartbeat. 

The Nolans had wanted to go with them; they had insisted that they needed an adult there to help them ask the right questions and understand the serious implications of everything. But Emma had been adamantly against that, she was ready to be an adult now - and Bae had been one for a very long time as far as she was concerned - and it didn’t matter if they had the  _ right _ questions, they would have  _ their _ questions and that was all that counted.

Bae tries to persuade her, if it’s important to her parents she should let them come, but he’s not quite ready to face the Nolans yet, so he is relieved when she sticks to her guns.

She picks him up from the airport and they head straight to the doctor’s office where Emma fills out a bunch of forms and they wait to hear her name called in a lobby full of nosy neighbors who are not at all surprised to see Baelfire Gold sitting in the lobby of a maternity clinic. Well, some of them are surprised, a lot of Storybrooke thought the Nolans would probably never hear from him again. 

When they’re ushered into the back room Bae turns around so that she can undress and she just laughs at him because it’s a little late for that, now isn’t it?

And Bae is a little frightened as the doctor turns on the screen and points to a little dot that does not look like a human at all, and says, “There it is, there’s your baby.”

And Emma is grinning and chatting with the doctor, but Bae can’t take his eyes off the screen. He has no clue what he’s looking at, but it’s still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. And he swears to God and the universe and himself that he will  _ not _ be like his parents. 

And then there is the heartbeat and Bae feels like time has stopped as the heavy thudding washes over him and he knows he will hear that sound in his ears for the rest of forever. 

“You alright?” Emma asks and he realizes that she and the doctor are both staring at him as he sits with his mouth hanging open, barely able to breath in the best way possible.

“Yeah,” he exhales, “It’s just… yeah… I’m fine. Are we going to get a copy of the picture?”

The doctor chuckles. “Of course. We’ll make sure you have plenty of copies for family too. Any other questions?”

Bae can’t think of anything, but Emma chimes up, “I read online that sex can cause premature labor. Is that true?”

And Bae thinks it’s a weird question, but he’s not opposed to knowing the answer to it. His hand falls to rest on the little blue box in his pocket that he had spent some of his mom’s money on before coming up here. 

“Yes, but not the way you’re thinking,” the doctor says with a laugh, “It’s perfectly safe, early on like this. If that changes a doctor will let you know.”

“Okay,” Emma smiles. “I’m sorry, it’s just my boyfriend and I were talking about it and… Thanks.”

And suddenly Bae thinks they might be able to hear his own heart thudding right next to his child’s, because ‘boyfriend’ was getting a little ahead of themselves. Not really. He wanted more than that, for sure, but they hadn’t had that talk yet. It was presumptuous of Emma, to just assume he was going to do the right thing - even if he planned on it.

But they also hadn’t had  _ that _ talk either, so what was she talking about?

“Boyfriend?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she admits, looking away as the doctor turns off the screen and heads out of the room to print out their pictures. “I wasn’t sure how to tell you, but I guess now is as good a time as any. Killian and I are back together. He’s not upset about the baby, and he’s been super supportive so far. I’m sorry, Bae, but you're in Tallahassee, and you’re not coming back any time soon, and I just don’t think I can do this alone.”

And he tells her he understands - that he’s happy for her - but his heart and that little blue box in his pocket all of a sudden feel very heavy. 

When they get back to the Nolan house, both her parents are too busy gushing over the sonograms to even notice that he’s there. Neither one says hello, or even looks at him, as he pulls a bar stool up to the kitchen island where he and Emma used to color back before they knew where babies came from or had entertained the thought of accidentally making one. 

Mary Margaret is trying not to cry as they pin the picture up to the fridge and Emma announces that she wants to go put her copy upstairs in her room. And Bae knows he should panic as she and her mother bound up the stairs full of excitement to find the perfect spot, leaving him alone with David Nolan, but he doesn’t really fear death anymore. He’s just kind of ready for whatever Mr. Nolan has to say this time.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he says, watching Mr. Nolan pull two cans of beer out of the fridge and pop open the tabs, sliding one across the kitchen island to him. “I’m just as surprised and upset about all this as you are.”

“Don’t be, Bae, we all knew it was coming,” Mr. Nolan says as he chugs half the can of beer in one gulp before leaning forward on his crossed arms to come face to face with Bae. “I mean, I didn’t think it was going to be with my Emma, but I wouldn’t say I’m surprised. Or, for the record, upset.”

“Oh, well, thank you, sir. And I promise, I’m going to be here as much as I can. I’ve got a job now, so I can send a little bit every month. It won’t be much at first but-”

“Don’t worry about the money, Bae, how much are you going to need for the wedding?”

“There’s not going to be a wedding,” Bae says, cutting off David’s protests quickly. “Emma is back with Killian and she seems pretty happy about it. So I’m going to be here, just like I’ve always been, but we’re not getting married. We weren’t ever dating. And I know that’s not what you want to hear, sir, but it’s the truth.”

“Killian, really?” Mr. Nolan scoffs, “You think he’s going to marry my daughter? Please. This kid needs a dad, Bae.”

“And I can be a dad. I’m going to be a dad. But I can do it without marrying Emma.”

“Only a coward would knock a girl up and not take responsibility for it, Balefire.”

And that makes him angry. Because this isn’t what he wanted, either. But he isn’t a coward.

So he takes the little blue box out of his pocket and slides it across the counter for David Nolan to open and gape at, dumb-founded. He can almost see the sparkle of the diamond reflected in David Nolan’s eyes, and it upsets him just how much time and energy he had put into picking out the right one. 

“No, only a coward would try to force his daughter into marrying someone she doesn’t love because he’s worried about what the town might think. She is already scared and confused enough as it is. And for the record, there isn’t going to be a wedding because it’s not what  _ Emma _ wants. And I really don’t care what you have to say about that. Because right now, Emma and my baby are the only thing that matters. Sir.”

He hears David call him back as he gets up to storm his way upstairs to join Emma and her mother, and put a stop to whatever unwanted pressure he is sure Mary Margaret is putting on her, too.

“Bae, you forgot your ring.”

“Keep it, it’s not like I’m going to need it, right?”

He makes sure Emma schedules her second sonogram around his final exams in May so that he can fly back for that one, too. He doesn’t want her to find out the sex of the baby without him. And he makes sure to call her after every doctor’s visit that he can't make it to for updates about her and the baby. 

And as heartbreaking as the whole trip turned out to be, he is glad he went to that first sonogram.

He tapes it up on his fridge back in Tallahassee and he begins every day reminding himself with that image why he is here. Why he needs this education. Why he can’t just give up and head back home. He’s not doing this for himself anymore. He’s doing this for his child.


	20. Child

Time stands still the day Emma watches Bae hold his newborn son for the first time. 

The morning she goes into labor, her first concern is making sure that she calls Bae. Killian, in a panic, tells her that’s probably not the most important thing to worry about, as he tries to rush her out of the little apartment they've just moved into and to the hospital, but she isn’t moving - and this baby isn’t coming - until Bae knows. So she watches Killian pout as the phone rings, and he picks up right away. 

She is almost worried he isn’t going to make it in time, he can’t get a flight out until the afternoon, and won’t be arriving until much later that night, so she begs her child on the way to the hospital to just wait a little longer, because daddy is coming, it’s just going to take some time. And Bae does make it, because their son is just as stubborn as they are, and so he waits for his father.

Which irks Killian and the Nolans to no end, because she is in pain and pacing around her hospital room and they just want it to be over with, to see her be able to relax and rest, but her labor drags on for hours - just long enough for Mr. Nolan to slip away and pick Bae up from the airport.

“If I miss the birth of my grandson because of this boy,” he starts to complain, but Emma and Mary Margaret shoot him a death glare and he is out the door quickly enough. 

Bae arrives at 7:45 and Henry is born at 8:15. 

Emma watches him cradle their son to his chest, weeping openly as he looks at the little boy, still cloaked in the silly blue cap and gown the delivery doctor made him wear to be in the room with her. And it’s another first for them: their first child.

But now _ their  _ firsts don’t matter anymore. Life becomes all about  _ Henry’s _ firsts. 

“Tell daddy what you said today,” she says, holding the phone up to Henry’s face and hoping he’ll repeat the words. Henry had said ‘hi!’ his first word ever a greeting to the world, fitting for the energetic little bundle of joy that he was.

“Hi!” Henry says into the phone and she can hear Bae’s gasp so loud on the other end that it startles Henry.

They watch their son take his first steps in the Nolan’s backyard at Bae’s twentieth birthday party, toddling between his father’s outstretched arms and his mother’s welcoming embrace.

Bae sends checks every month, despite never once being asked to, and more than that he tucks them away inside little care packages filled with new snacks and toys and story books for Henry. He calls every night to read Henry a bedtime story, Facetimes on weekends to see his son, and is constantly checking in with Emma for updates. He is as doting as a father all the way across the country can be, and he flies back every time he has a break from school. He never once sees a sick day roll over into the next year because he spends them all as quickly as he gets them, eager to be with his son.

And then comes the really big first that almost kills Emma as Bae proposes it over the phone, caution in his voice, not wanting to get his hopes up. Henry’s first trip to Disney. It’s summertime and Henry is five and why can’t he just come visit for a week or two?

“You can fly down with him,” Bae suggests, “If you’re nervous about sending him alone. We could all go, like a family.”

“I don’t know, Bae,” she sighs into the phone, seeing Killian look up at her from his spot in front of the TV, “I’d have to see if Killian and I can get off work and-”

“No,” Bae corrects her firmly, “ _ You _ could fly down. It’s a little apartment. Killian isn’t welcome.”

It’s the only thing they disagree on when it comes to raising Henry. Bae doesn’t like the way Killian is with their son. Killian isn’t a bad surrogate father, Emma thinks, but it seems like every time he makes a mistake, it is always when Bae is there to catch him. It bothers Emma, because she really wishes they would just get along, for Henry’s sake, but neither man seems willing to bury the hatchet they’d been attacking each other with since they were younger than Henry.

She approaches the subject with Killian, but in the end he is completely against the idea of her going to Florida with Henry. It’s not that he didn't trust her, he assures her, but it’s Bae and they both know what happened the last time she went to Florida with him, and maybe Killian does have a point. Still, she sends Henry and feels a little bit of longing every day that Bae sends her pictures of their son, ice cream smeared across his round little face, sitting in Snow White’s lap, Mickey ears too big for his head balanced precariously as he grins at the camera. They send her pictures of the two of them at the beach - Bae’s tattoo visible and it hurts her heart a little - as they build sandcastles and collect seashells. She even gets a picture that makes her heart race of both Bae and Henry sitting on top of an alligator - its mouth taped shut for safety, of course - both wearing matching idiot grins as they pose like they’ve just captured the critter. 

Henry comes back from his two weeks with his dad over the moon and begging to go back again next summer. And it annoys Killian to no end, because Henry is not very happy to see him at all. She suggests that maybe they spend some more time together, maybe Henry just needs to get to know Killian better, and so Killian agrees to start watching Henry when Emma is busy at work. Neither he nor Henry seem super thrilled about it.

One day on her drive home from work she gets a call from Bae, but she’s driving and it’s not one of the normal times he calls to talk to Henry, so she ignores it. He calls back again, not even waiting long enough to have left a message.

She picks it up, pressing the speaker button and sitting it in the passenger seat while she continues to drive.

“Is everything okay, Bae?”

“You tell me,” he shoots back with anger in his voice. She hasn’t heard him speak like that since he was eighteen and angry at the world.

“Yeah, everything is fine,” she says confused.

“How’s our son?” he asks, and if she’s not mistaken there's a smug lilt to his voice.

“He’s fine.”

“Where is he right now?” Bae asks, and now she’s not mistaken. He’s mad - but he also knows something she doesn’t and that makes her uncomfortable.

“Killian is watching him; I had work today.”

“Is he?” Bae asks and she can picture the face he’s making, lips tucked into a frown, eyes squinting at her in annoyance. “Cause I just got an interesting call from Belle. Apparently, Henry was home alone. And he  _ walked _ ten blocks to come visit her and my dad. Because our son is  _ five _ , and even he is smarter than Killian and knows that he shouldn’t be home alone.”

Emma is stunned into silence, her heart racing.

“Is he okay?”

“Trust me, Emma, if he wasn’t okay this would be a very different phone call,” Bae growls, “I don’t want him watching my son anymore.”

“Bae, he’s Henry’s dad-”

“No, he’s not!” she hears Bae roar on the other end of the phone, almost swerving the car in surprise, she has to pull over because her heart is beating too quickly. She’s never heard Bae yell like that, even  _ when _ he was eighteen and angry at the world. “He is not Henry’s father, I am, and I don’t want him watching my son! I’m serious about this Emma, if I hear about something like this happening again I am filing for custody so fast it will make your head spin. I think I’ve been more than accommodating of you and Killian. I’ve spent all of my vacation time traveling up there so that you don’t have to. I’ve never asked for a day, even a holiday, that you weren’t willing to part with. I’ve sent checks, despite the fact that you and Killian are both capable of supporting Henry without my help, and I’ve never said a bad thing about that moron in front of our son because I know he is important to you. But our son is five, and I will not have him wandering the neighborhood like I used to, getting into trouble - or worse, getting hurt - because it’s the _ nice _ thing to do. I am not going to play  _ nice  _ when it comes to Henry’s safety anymore. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she mumbles quietly into the phone.

“Now go pick him up from Belle’s and apologize to them,” he huffs into the phone, the line clicking dead.

And so she does apologize. And she also gives Belle her cellphone number and begs her to please, next time, call her instead of Bae. 

“Emma, dearie,” Mr. Gold says with a glare, “If there is a  _ next time _ , us calling Bae should be the least of your concerns.”

So when she gets home she tears into Killian, who of course tries to blame it on Bae at first.

How dare he try to threaten her custody, that was selfish and immature of him. How dare Bae claim he cared more about her and Henry when Killian is the one who has been by her side this whole time. How dare he think he has any right to judge Killian’s mistakes when he’s not around enough to make any of his own.

And that’s not good enough for Emma.

So he begins to apologize in a roundabout way. He didn't know Henry couldn’t stay home by himself. He stayed home all the time when he was that age.

“But you had older siblings to watch you,” she reminds him. “Killian, this is serious. This is our child.”

“Which  _ our _ are you referring to, Emma, because it’s hard to tell sometimes,” he hisses back and suddenly this isn’t about Henry anymore. 

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she asks.

“I just… I just think I’ll feel differently when it’s my kid. I’m sorry, you know I love you and Henry, but he’s not my kid and he’s not my responsibility.”

And so Emma packs a bag and takes Henry to her parents' house for the weekend, to bitch and moan to the Nolans about the whole mess. And they already know, because Bae called them, too. 

“He says he’ll feel differently when it’s his kid,” she whines to Mary Margaret as David tucks Heny into bed. “But I just don’t know if that’s true. And that scares me.”

“Let me ask you this,” her mother says, squeezing her hand gently. “If that little boy upstairs had black hair and blue eyes, do you think Bae would care?”

And so she thinks back to the way Bae cradled their son on that first day at the hospital, gingerly rocking the little boy that looks so much like his father, and making promises he had done everything in his power to keep. She thinks back to Bae’s head resting on her shoulder as the three of them fell asleep that first night in the hospital, after everyone else had been sent home, and wishes things had been different. Wishes she had made some different choices. Because it was too late to fix them now, but her mistakes glare at her so obviously through the past that she knows exactly which threads she would have to go back and untie to get her to the life she wants and not the one she has.

Because Bae didn’t become a dad the first day he held their son.

Bae had quit smoking for his little brother when he was seventeen years old. He had stood up against bullies all through middle school, making sure that no one felt as alone and afraid as he had. Bae had helped preserve her belief in magic and happy endings - spinning stories to help her believe in things like the tooth fairy, and heaven help the person who tried to take that innocence away from her.

And she knows without a doubt, Mary Margaret is right. No matter who Henry’s father was, Bae wouldn’t have cared as long as she was his mother.


	21. Wedding

Bae goes to Emma Nolan’s first wedding, even though everyone he knows begs him not to. 

Belle tries to argue with him about it when he first arrives from the airport, she tells him he’s being selfish, and silly, and even that Emma had only invited him to be polite because he was Henry’s dad and Henry was the ring bearer. She even sends his little brother to try and change his mind, but he tells Gideon the same thing he tells Belle and his friends back in Tallahassee who also had the good sense to tell him this was a bad idea.

“This is important to me. You don’t have to understand. But I need you to support me.”

His old friends take him out for drinks the night before and try to convince him that staying home and getting drunk is a much better idea. They poke and they prod at those old wounds, and Bae almost worries he’s going to end up in jail again tonight, but he’s a different man now - has to be for his son - and so he heads home. 

But he doesn’t stop drinking, because going to this thing sober would be an absolute nightmare. 

His dad just watches him from the doorway as Bae adjusts his tie in the mirror and raises an eyebrow, daring Mr. Gold to say something.

“You’re just torturing yourself,” his dad mumbles.

“Yep,” Bae agrees, “But the whole town is going to be there, and if I’m not, people will talk.”

“Let people talk,” his dad urges, stepping forward to fix the lopsided knot in his tie that Bae’s drunken fingers can’t quite seem to get right. “People have talked about you your whole life. What’s one more day?”

But Bae is insistent he is going. He sits his gift he bought last minute off the registry on the table at the back and tries to find a seat where no one will notice. It’s hard in the rooftop setting, but he’s determined to be here without messing this day up for Emma. And so he steers clear of her three bridesmaids - having slept with one of them back in high school - and he steers clear of the three groomsmen too, because he doesn’t want anyone starting any fights.

He’s here today to prove that he’s not the same boy that left Storybrooke seven years ago, and they can all stop whispering and wondering, because he’s doing just fine in Florida on his own, thank you very much.

So he doesn’t say hello to the Nolans who are standing at the front greeting everyone else, and he doesn’t sit with his parents and little brother who are also near the front bouncing Henry in his ring bearer attire on their laps. 

He doesn’t even congratulate Killian - because he knows it wouldn’t sound sincere and he doesn’t want to do anything that might put any sort of damper on this day for Emma.

And he has a lot of negative thoughts, but he keeps them to himself. Because Killian’s earring might look stupid - but Bae has a tattoo he regrets sometimes so he shouldn’t judge. And the pink flowers that match the peachy color of her bridesmaids dresses seem a little over the top, but it’s not his wedding so what does he know? And even if he thinks the music is a little too sappy and modern for a really classy ceremony, he knows that Emma has put a lot of time and money into this wedding and so he isn’t here to ruin it, to pick it apart, to criticize. He’s here to be supportive of her and his son, like a mature father would be. 

And Emma is of course beautiful as she steps through the gauzy curtains they’ve set up to give the outdoor setting a feeling of walls, because Emma is always beautiful. But he wonders who helped her pick her dress - too much lace and layers reminding him more of a Victorian ghost than the princess dresses he’d watched her dance in as a child. And he wonders who told her to wear her hair up, because Emma is always at her most beautiful when her long blonde locks are flowing freely. And he thinks that maybe she looks a little scared, but that’s to be expected at a wedding - it’s a big deal and he isn’t going to read too much into it. 

So Bae sits quietly as David walks her down the aisle, lifting her veil and kissing her cheek, before receding to his seat at the front. And as he turns, he catches Bae’s eye. And Bae thinks about the day with the ring and how much he wishes he could go back and let it play out a little differently, and David thinks about the boy he probably shouldn't have spent so much time trying to protect his daughter from and wishes he could go back and let things play out a little bit differently, too. 

And Mary Margaret is already crying as the vows begin, and Henry is squirming uncomfortably in Belle’s lap, and Bae is just trying not to throw up because he’s still a little drunk and this whole thing - despite the copious amounts of fresh air - is making him feel just a little sick. 

The vows are sappy, they’ve written them themselves, and three years publishing for a small magazine, Bae knows he could have done a better job writing them. But he went off to get his degree in this, and for him writing things that sound nice is his job, and so he tries to be accommodating of the way Killian and Emma both stumble through vows that sound a little bit more sad than loving. That focus a little bit more on what each of them has lost, instead of the future they will be gaining. 

And then they get to  _ that  _ part. 

“If anyone has any objections as to why these two should not be joined today in holy matrimony-”

And the whole congregation turns to stare at him as one, so he guesses he wasn’t as good at sneaking in as he thought he was. And they’re all staring, including Emma and Killian who he has to assume have had this argument long before today, but he bites his lip and tries not to acknowledge the uncomfortable looks, hoping they’ll get on with the ceremony as quickly as possible.

Because he is not going to say anything.

It is too late for him to say something now. 

So he is  _ not  _ going to say anything.

“Really? No one else is going to? Fine, I guess I’ll say it. I object, and I think we all know why.”

And suddenly no one is looking at Bae anymore. 

All eyes turn to David Nolan who is standing at the front of the crowd, his daughter giving him a death glare while Killian looks like he’s about to lose his shit. 

“Me too!” Mary Margaret says quickly, shooting out of her seat to take her husband’s hand and smile apologetically at their daughter.

“I know I haven't been around as long as everyone else, but I object too,” Belle says, standing as she shifts Henry into his brother’s lap.

Rumple casts a nervous look over his shoulder at his son, now turning red with mortification, before standing to join his wife. “Oh, alright. I guess I’ve got to object as well.”

“I object, too! I object, too!” Henry cheers from his uncle’s lap and as embarrassed as he is, Bae has to grin a little at the tenacity of his son.

And now everyone is turning to look at him again, some people standing and craning their necks to get a good look at Baelfire Gold in his suit and tie with his neatly trimmed hair and beard, looking nothing like the hellion that used to terrorize the streets of Storybrooke back in his younger days.

And Killian is going to murder him - he can see it in the other man’s eyes - as the silence grows thicker, the priest unsure what to do about this. No one has ever objected before, much less so many people all at once.

And Bae meets Emma’s eyes across the rooftop as the priest flips through the pages in his book trying to find the right protocol for this. And she looks devastated. Because it’s her wedding day, and this is not how she wants to remember it.

But hey, it’s already ruined, and everyone is still looking at him.

“So I guess I better speak now, or forever hold my peace, right?” he says, standing up to make his way to the front of the crowd. To make his way toward Emma. 

Yes, Bae is really glad he goes to Emma Gold’s first wedding, because it means he gets to be there for the second one, too.


	22. Forever

The clock starts over.

Everything becomes a first again.

Their first kiss as a married couple. Their first dance. Their first daughter.

And their second one, too.

And that’s the really beautiful thing. They don't just have firsts anymore. They have seconds, and thirds, and eternities. They have a life that they are building together to stand against the test of time. And it’s no longer about clinging to memories of their ‘first’ times, because it’s about loving the mundanity of the things they’ve done a million times.

But there are still some big firsts that they celebrate, often with a glass of champagne and some stolen moments of ‘alone time’. 

There is their first house that Bae buys in the suburbs of Tallahassee, moving his things out of his little apartment a week before Henry and Emma arrive with all their things. He waits anxiously in the driveway for David Nolan’s truck, sweeping his finance and son into his arms as they climb out of the cab and his soon-to-be father-in-law begins to unload the truck. That house might be their first, but it is the setting for every day of the next three decades.

There is their first big fight when Bae tells her that she can’t go back to work two months after having their second child. They scream and they yell, because he doesn’t want her to push herself and she doesn’t want to be one of those women who give up their careers for their husbands. But eventually they manage to agree - two months is too soon, but six is too long - and Emma has the rest of her life to worry about her career, and Bae has the rest of his life to worry about her.

There is their first vacation without the kids when Emma rents a cabin for their four-year anniversary and asks her parents to come down and stay with Henry, and Mary, and Jenny. Bae checks his phone nervously the whole trip, anxiously wondering how the kids are doing while Emma finds more and more persuasive ways to make him relax and forget about all that. And while it’s a little more stressful than relaxing, they’ll miss that anxiety the first vacation they take with all the kids, who argue and fight in the backseat of the car, all three just as ridiculously stubborn as their parents.

They have firsts they don’t tell anyone about: Bae’s first vasectomy (which doesn’t take and Jenny is born nine months later). They have firsts they tell everyone about: Henry’s first graduation (which is only half as special as his second one from college, or his third with his Masters Degree). 

They have firsts as individuals, as a couple, and as a family.

And when all those firsts are done, when they wave their youngest off to college and sell the house in Tallahassee for a smaller condo even further south, they get to start over again. Their first time as empty-nesters.

Baelfire and Emma Gold are not each other's  _ firsts _ . They are each other's _ forevers. _


End file.
